"I had been looking for some time to find a way to get the same type of Software RAID support under Windows that is available under Linux for my multiple USB-2 and Firewire drives. Then, I found the coLinux project, and discovered a way to have my Windows and my software RAID too."

In this first in a series of five tutorials, Ian introduces you to configuring your system hardware with Linux. By the end of this tutorial, you will know how Linux configures the hardware found on a modern PC and where to look if you have problems (free reg. req.).

"The Gentoo Foundation is both pleased and proud to announce the much anticipated release of Gentoo Linux 2005.1. Due to a scheduled power outage at the Open Source Laboratory affecting our master mirror, the release is currently only available for download via BitTorrent. We anticipate recovery from the downtime and full staging of release material to mirrors within 48 hours, accompanied by a comprehensive PR and ChangeLog." In addition, the Gentoo Installer reached their 0.1 release.

With Vista, Microsoft is addressing what's become a sad truth for most people: PCs run more slowly over time. Vista will automatically de-fragment hard disks, make better use of memory to more quickly load programs, and include a new performance control panel that will identify performance bottlenecks, according to the company. Elsewhere, ActiveWin hosts widescreen, high-res screenshots of Vista.

Growth in the Digital Special Effects and computer animation industry, a sub-segment of the media and entertainment industry, is exploding world wide. A number of reasons have caused this growth and they involve the merging of technology and imagination.This article illustrates the dynamics and business model and processes of the animation effects industry and introduce the existing infrastructure.

Agile development methodologies might be the new fad in software design, but how much emphasis is there on secure code? Australian .NET developer and consultant at Readify, Rocky Heckman, reveals some concerns of agile development methodologies.

Macromedia Monday announced Macromedia Studio 8, the new version of its suite for Web designers, video professionals and graphic artists to design, develop and maintain interactive online applications and content

Ultimate++ 0.98.7 was released. Ultimate++ (U++) is an attempt to provide the optimal Windows/Linux development platform based on C++. By utilizing of new ideas in C++ development, Ultimate++ achieves significant reduction of source code complexity for most applications when compared to other development platforms. To get a clue how development using U++ looks like, see this example.

According to the guys at www.osx86.classicbeta.com, some intrepid individuals have been able to get OS X running on generic hardware. There is a full explaination and some details on the site.

Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. This means that OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision.

SkyOS Beta 8.5 has just been released. New features include the Indexing Service, an SQL based file attribute and content index service which makes it possible to find your files in a fraction of a second, better developer support, and a lot of bug fixes. NVU has also been ported and is available in this release. You can read the changelog here. Update: Screenshots gallery by OSDir.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2." A list of mirrors is available here.

More details are leaking out about the Debian Core Consortium, which will be announced at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The public relations manager of desktop Linux vendor Linspire, Heather MacKenzie, revealed that the "the DCC's official name is the Debian Common Core Alliance."

"One of the new additions of Fedora Core 4 is a natively compiled version of Eclipse. I took it for a spin to see if it is a suitable replacement for 'regular' Eclipse."