With just two days to go before the expiration of mainstream support for Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, the software giant has provided an update rollup with more than 50 security patches and system reliability fixes. The Microsoft knowledgebase article provides more info.

Apple has refreshed it's line of iPods today. All iPods now boast a color screen similar to the iPod Photo. Also, iTunes 4.9 has been released with support for podcasting. Mac users can use Software Update, Windows users can download it here. And the new iTunes release is riddled with references to the iTunes phone, says AppleInsider.

Sun Microsystems is stepping away from an effort to sell the Linux operating system for desktop computers, the server and software company's top software executive said Tuesday.

Eclipse version 3.1 is now available. New features added in this release: full support for Java 5.0 and improved support for developing rich client applications.

I'm very pleased to announce the addition of some new members to the core OSNews staff. Thom Holwerda and Andrew Youll officially started late last night, and as you can see from their postings, they've hit the ground running. Read more for some information on the latest additions to our family, and also for some exciting news about the site.

"The NetBSD-Office Project is an approach to provide NetBSD users a common, preconfigured and ready to use Office Environment. The installation CDROM is a modified NetBSD 2.0 installation CD-ROM, which installs the Operating System and a set of preselected third party programs in one step, including preconfiguration for an easy startup. Or short: install - reboot - start using KDE." A new release with KDE 3.4.1 as well as screenshots is at the side project's website.

Qt 4.0 release is on the wire. Among other things, that means the long awaited GPL-licensed Windows version is now available for download, and Qt4 is officially dual-licensed across the board. Also of note in Trolltech's announcement: integration with Visual Studio .NET; great strides in graphics, threading, footprint, and performance; and separation into Desktop, Desktop Light, and (non-GUI) Console versions.

"Today, we are open-sourcing Sun's server side implementation of Java," Schwartz told an audience of about 10,000 software developers and Sun partners. "This is the first step in open-sourcing all of Sun's Java software assets." It will be released under Sun's CDDL.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has confessed the software giant's .Net strategy has come to a standstill, says he's accepted SQL Server's shortcomings and vowed to keep fighting search giant Google.

Rexx is a scripting language that was invented at IBM years ago. The Linux community has largely ignored Rexx, but I believe it could play an important role in Linux's challenge to the Windows desktop. How can a language many in the Linux community have never even heard of be valuable in Linux's fight for the desktop?

In a joint press conference with Toshiba today, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has again pledged his support for the Tablet PC. It's a pet project of his and despite lacklustre sales so far - it might break through a million sales in this, its third year - he's keen to see it succeed.

Gary Benson (Red Hat) has made available Jonas in the Fedora Java development list (screenshot). Along with the large number of free and open source Java packages made available in Fedora Core 4 already, more are being added to rawhide compiled with GCJ. These include Lucene, additional Jakarta components, and more. You can read the rawhide reports in Fedora Test to track the rolling development updates.

The AmiZilla Team has released an update report on the progress which has been made since the project to port Firefox to AmigaOS and its clones started. The Amiga OpenOffice.org team will update the community of their progress at the upcoming AmiGBG fair.

AMD has filed an antitrust complaint against Intel. On a 48-page complaint AMD explains how the company thinks Intel has maintained its monopoly in the x86 microprocessor market by engaging in worldwide coercion of customers from dealing with AMD. It identifies 38 companies that have been victims of coercion by Intel. AMD claims that Intel's share of this critical market currently counts for about 80 percent of worldwide sales by unit volume and 90 percent by revenue, giving it entrenched monopoly ownership and super-dominant market power.