Sun Microsystems chose to employ the human touch when it introduced more than 5 million lines of Solaris source code onto the Internet on Tuesday.

Brian Jones, a Microsoft employed Office developer, speaks about the new XML format to appear in the new version of Microsoft Office and answers a lot of questions about the OASIS issue. No the formats will not be compatible and Brian takes the time to say why: "Our primary goal at Microsoft was to create an open format that fully represented all of the features that our customers have used in their existing documents, documents that have been created using the existing Office products over the past couple decades."

REAL Software announced today that REALbasic 2005 for Linux, a groundbreaking new visual development environment for Linux, is available for public beta and can be downloaded now from www.realsoftware.com/demo. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be offered for free when it ships in August. The Mac OS X version was posted today.

The opensolaris.org community site is now live. Source code (some 20,000 files) is available for download, torrent and perusal. Mailing lists, a project overview and a community portal are also live.

Hyperion Entertainment announced the immediate availability of the final intermediate update of Amiga OS 4.0 prior to its full commercial release later this year. People can testdrive the latest release at the upcoming '20th birhday of Amiga' celebration events in California and Sweden.

As of June 8, 2005, you can download initialization and boot source code based on the IEEE-1275 Standard for Boot Initialization Configuration Firmware.

GnomeFiles.org, the software repository for applications using the multi-platform toolkit GTK+, is now one year old. During that time 840 applications were posted and 240,000+ file downloads occured. The site now enjoys about 20,000 pageviews daily on average (which was our initial goal). A few more statistics for the curious: 69% of GnomeFiles' visitors are using Linux and it was a surprise for us that only 1.2% are using a *BSD. Regarding browsers, Firefox dominates with 71% while Gnome's Epiphany scores a 5% with IE barely at 6%. We would like to thank our loyal GnomeFiles visitors for their support. Please leave a comment if you would like to see a new feature on GnomeFiles.org.

Sun Microsystems is expected to release Solaris as open-source software Tuesday, a centerpiece of the company's plan to regain lost relevance and fend of rivals Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft.

Consumers will be able to play graphically rich, high-performance Amiga content on U3 powered USB smart drives. AmigaAnywhere is the digital environment that enables and simplifies access to the same applications from a variety of devices. Amiga lets consumers enjoy rich-media content featuring extraordinary audio-visual quality, high-speed interactive gaming, education and entertainment, all playing on a diverse universe of devices. Click here to read the full article.

The rapid rise of Ubuntu Linux tells an interesting story. You may find this article helpful in understanding this Linux phenomenon.

I chose Minislack because of the low requirements (running fine on my Pentium II - 400 MHz with 256 Mb RAM, 32 Mb swap, on a 1.5 Gb harddrive partition - I recommend 2 Gb, though).

The Qt 4 Resource Center has a look at the demonstrations and examples of Qt 4 RC 1 in a new article sprinkled with screenshots. Showing not only the different applications, but also different modes for filling, aliasing, drawing and transforming, the shots provide a good view of the next generation of Qt.

Joe Barr recently asked Linus Torvalds for his thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and BSD, and about how much synergy there might be between the Linux kernel and the BSDs.

MadPenguin reviews Xandros Desktop 3 Business Edition, screenshots included.