Solaris Express 6/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 15) was posted today, providing a host of improvements including aggressive use of large pages, desktop enhancements, the "Nemo" (GLDv3) network driver framework, DTrace enhancements, and a host of bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.4 for Linux and Unix operating systems. The KOffice 1.4 release is a large step towards embracing the OASIS OpenDocument file format which has become an approved standard for office file formats. This format is also used by the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0, thus providing high interoperability. New applications in the 1.4 release: Krita - A pixel based image manipulation application and Kexi - An integrated data management application.

Like it or not, but sooner or later you realize that you'll have to write shell-scripts to administer UNIX. And among these scripts there certainly will be those to cooperate with interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, su, password, ssh. But it means the end of the admin's quiet life because while dealing with interactive programs one often come across numerous hidden traps which doesn't usually happen with ordinary sh-scripts. Though fortunately or may be not, but most of these problems generally turn up within first five minutes of the work under the script. The symptoms typically look like that author can't pass the authentication from the script. At first you feel confused because usual pipe constructions such as:

While some in the Linux community are scratching their heads over the latest acquisition by Mandriva, one prominent member has a notion what the French distribution company is doing, and wholeheartedly approves. Also, Mandriva has announced the release of its Multi Network Firewall (MNF), version 2.

Close on the heels of the popular Fedora Core 4 release is the budding preliminary plans for next release of Fedora Core 5.

A few months ago I published a how-to article showing how to make a Linux machine a Bluetooth 'LAN Access Point' so Bluetooth clients can get internet access via it. This worked fine with Panther, but it seems that the new Bluetooth preference panels on Tiger are not only much better to a certain level, but buggy and puzzling at the very same time.

Extended attributes are name/value pairs that can be assigned to any file and directory. They allow for more infomation to be embedded in the filesystem when file and directory names aren't enough, like ID3 tags on mp3s. Most Linux distributions and filesystems support it, and you just need to turn it on. Linux.com has more.

Greg Taylor reviews Ubuntu Linux and gives it a 10 out of 10 in his 4-page review.

After a long wait the new major version 0.7 update to Portable.NET has finally been released. The new version features numerous performance improvements, fixes for WinForms and Xml, and many other changes - read the full list of changes. The new release also brings a new runtime package (at this stage for Windows systems only) - at just under 2MB. More details.

Two Microsoft interviews, here and here , discussing virtualization, clustering and Longhorn.

Mandriva, with the recent purchase of Lycoris, a U.S. Linux desktop distributor, is expanding rapidly, but analysts ask whether it's growing fast enough to compete with the major Linux vendors: Red Hat and Novell/SuSE.

Tired of getting up from your desk to fax a document? Have you ever wondered why your company’s call center maintains wall-sized desks of fax machines? Employees at many large organizations are asking the same questions. Fortunately, so is Biscom, Inc. While there are a few companies providing enterprise fax solutions, Biscom, in this author’s opinion, stands out as the market leader.

RISC OS users have crowed for years about the intuitiveness of their operating system's GUI. But that vaunted usability is of little utility in this modern world without a modern web browser to go with it. So you'll understand the importance of the RISC OS Firefox port released today.

Sun Microsystems unwrapped two new identity management products this week, designed to ease the process of federating identity across multiple partners and customers.