Apple Computer this week began asking its developers to test and report back to the company on the first external pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.4.3, a forthcoming maintenance release to the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system.

Both nVidia (also nForce) and Ati have released beta versions of their driver packages for Windows Vista, both client and server editions. ActiveWin also has a list of drivers included in Vista beta 1.

A security expert has agreed never to repeat what he knows about various flaws in Software from networking giant Cisco.

Peter Golde, one of the original designers of the C# language, has been working recently on Power Collections for .NET, which is now released. According to the web site Power Collections is a "Community Project to Develop the Best Public License Collection Classes for .NET"

YellowTAB released a Zeta 1.0 LiveCD and they are charging just 10 Euros for it. If you return it you get a 5 Euro discount toward the normal CD version of 1.0.

According to an announcement posted on the Carbon developer's mailing list, Metrowerks announced at AdHoc that the forthcoming release of CodeWarrior 10 will be the last for OS X. This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market, but it's still the end of an era. CodeWarrior literally saved Apple's bacon during the transition to PowerPC in the early 1990s by shipping the first working set of developer tools for the new platform. And since then CodeWarrior has been the main toolkit for commercial development on the Mac (especially pre-XCode).

Mad Penguin has published an excellent interview with Techmeister Leo Laporte. It's a two page review in which Leo discusses the possibility of a UNIX owned future. The interview starts here.

If you are looking for a desktop Linux with all the ease and user-friendliness of OS X, Linspire Five-O is a great option. It may not be the best for advanced users, but home and SOHO users will be happy with its performance, support, and great looks, the review says.

"This review will not try to cater to users new to the BeOS world, but will focus on what has changed since my review of ZETA RC1 and what remains to be done for future releases."

Following the release of KDE 3.4.2 yesterday, the Kubuntu team is proud to announce a new Kubuntu livecd with KDE 3.4.2 and the also recently released Koffice 1.4.1.

Opera Software today released the second upgrade to Opera 8. The new version, Opera 8.02, is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and includes security upgrades and smaller bug fixes. Download & changelog.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is in the works and is supposed to be released before Windows Vista. The following site has an ongoing updated list of fixes and downloads going into SP3.

Every year most Linux hackers attend a conference where they talk about all those topics only kernel hackers talk about. Papers of all the talks are now available, with a wide range of topics: NTPL, XEN, page cache performance, I/O scheduling, future ext3 development, VM, and more. Also, as every year, LWN's excellent kernel summit coverage is now freely available.

Windows Vista won't be released until the end of 2006, a Microsoft exec let slip in a presentation on Microsoft's campus yesterday. The next version of Windows was expected in the second half of 2006, but at a financial analyst conference in Washington, Microsoft senior VP Will Poole revealed it would not appear until the 2006 US holiday season. In related news, a senior Microsoft executive has identified Apple as an obstacle to Redmond's success.