Instead of being put off by the announcement of Apple's imminent switch to Intel chips, developers attending WWDC seemed to take the announcement in stride, with many predicting a smooth transition to new processor.

Apple seeded a new build of Mac OS X 10.4.2 to developers. Build 8C27 addresses a few bugs from build 8C26 and features an "improved widget download experience." Individuals have submitted Xbench benchmark results from Apple's Pentium 4-based Power Mac systems. The benchmarks do not reflect native performance of the 3.6GHz systems, however, but rather provide an indication of how PowerPC-compiled applications will run under Rosetta on Intel-based systems.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that it has released SciTech SNAP Graphics 3.0 for Linux. It offers support for XFree86 and X.org. SciTech SNAP Graphics delivers advanced 2D acceleration for business users, Plug-N-Play support for hundreds of graphics cards and now provides advanced XVideo acceleration for ATI’s desktop and mobile graphics processor, making enterprise wide deployment and management easier and more powerful than ever.

According to this CNET report next week is the launch date for OpenSolaris. "After having dipped a Solaris toe into the open-source waters last January, Sun Microsystems will take the full plunge next week. The company's OpenSolaris effort will go live early next week, a Sun representative said.

Guest PC, as described by Lismore Software Systems, Ltd., is "another computer inside your Mac". While in simplicity this is true, Guest PC offers Mac users far more. Guest PC has received a few bad reviews along the way, however, version 1.4 makes up for many of the previous versions shortcomings. This review will discuss the features and highlight some of the improvements found in Guest PC 1.4.

After my editorial yesterday about the hurdles the Linux desktop will have to endure after Apple moves to x86, two high-profile editors seconded the notion: read John C. Dvorak's editorial and eWEEK's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's analysis.

For more than 20 years, Steve Ballmer has been Microsoft's chief salesman, promoting his company's products with a mixture of over-the-top enthusiasm, street-fighter brashness and market savvy.

Ross Burton has written new entry on his personal blog with a good summary about X architecture these days. It's a great reading if you just became lost between so many new extensions, different X servers and ways to hardware accelerated it.

Apple opened the WebKit development in OpenDarwin, with a public bug/feature request database, and may give direct access to the repository for trusty (the ones with good patches record) contributors. Check-out the WebKit Open Source Site more.

If you are a gadget/mobile geek and you happen to live in the Bay Area, you are in luck. Every first Monday of the month mobility fans will gather and talk about their passion with others. The gathering, named Mobile Monday, is organized by Yahoo!'s Russell Beattie who is responsible for evangelizing, strategizing and managing development of new mobile Y! products and services.

Most people switching to Linux aren't switching because of the ease of use, or the shiny graphics, or the pretty interface. They switch for a variety of reasons, some would say it lowers the operating cost, some do it to support Free Software, others may do it because of its technical capabilities, etc.

Yellow Dog Linux will remain a Linux development company with 100% focus on the Power Architecture (IBM, Freescale). They will not transition to support an x86/ia64 architecture.

Rosetta — the software to be used to translate PowerPC instructions to x86 instructions — is no good if your application requires a G4 or G5, or AltiVec. FAT/Universal recompiled binaries will be the way to go for these apps. Also, XCode 2.1 was posted for download today along with QT 7-beta for Windows. Performance of HD h.264 on Windows XP on a 3 GHz P4 was hugely dissapointing compared to a dual 1.25 GHz PowerMac G4. Elecard's h.264 decoding solution is still better than QT's on the PC -- so far.

Today's confirmation that Apple is going x86 makes today a historic day in the industry. It may mean that Microsoft might see a few percent decline of their market share the next few years, but what about Linux? If Linux were to lose an equal amount of share it would alter its spread to the desktop, a spread that has been very positive so far.