According to Debian Planet, the Sarge freeze is now official and a May 30 release date has been set.

Apple Computer sped up its iMac line on Tuesday, adding faster processors and graphics chips along with its just-released Mac OS X Tiger operating system. My Take: The high-end eMac model seems like an awesome deal.

OASIS announced that OpenDocument v1.0 will be recognised as the OASIS standard for documentation. Several open source office suites including Openoffice 2.0, Koffice and Abiword (Planned) will support the new standard.

Tiger Server is loaded with technologies that provide great opportunities for developers, including Xgrid, 64-bit support, Access Control Lists, and more.

Mandriva has released the CD and DVD ISO images of Mandriva Linux 2005 Limited Edition for i586 to their download mirrors.

PC-BSD is a new FreeBSD 5.3 distribution, with a graphical installer and KDE 3.4 as its desktop. A new beta version was just released, and though I can't say I have much experience with FreeBSD, or any *BSD for that matter, I was curious enough to try it. And I'm glad I did. From a desktop user's point of view, completely oblivious to the many virtues and sound foundation of all things BSD, all I really ever wanted was an OS that is solid, easy to install and, well ... fun to work with.

LinuxQuestions.org has just posted an interview with Mandriva founder Gael Duval.

Continuing with its open-source theme, Apple on Friday released Mac OS X Tiger Server v10.4. The new server software relies on new open-source projects to implement many of its new features, including an iChat server and mail enhancements.

New in GNU Classpath 0.15: Optimized nio and nio.charset packages plus io streams integration leading to large speedups in character stream performance. To complement this new framework a native iconv based charset provider was added. Better support for free swing metal and pluggable lafs. Some org.omg.CORBA support added. Better java.beans support for the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. Completely lock free ThreadLocal implementation added. More javax.swing.text support for RTF and HTML. More flexible runtime interfaces and build configuration options added. Release announcement.

As a followup on the earlier news reports on Ian's comments that Ubuntu "is a net negative for Debian", more friction between Debian and Ubuntu developers have burst out over Ubuntu package maintainers modifying Debian packages without changing the contact information results in inconsistent bug reports in the Debian bug tracker.

There's an opening for Linux to grab a much larger market share on the consumer desktop side over the next twelve to eighteen months, but penguin advocates need to pull their act together and hope a couple of software companies – or one big hardware company – decides to throw their weight into giving Microsoft heartburn.

So, with WinHEC coming to a close, the biggest talk was of course the newest release of Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Codename Longhorn, now at build 5048. With nearly one year since the previous release (build 4074) build 5048 sports some new features and lacks some others. Recently, the talk was centered around the lack of WinFS, the new futuristic Windows File system. However, we'll get to all that a little later.

Qemu 0.7.0 has been released. Changelog here: Full x86_64 and MMX/SSE/SSE2 emulation support. SPARC target can now boot Linux. Much improved ARM user mode emulation. Many bug fixes.

The topic of polymorphism is given mystical status in some programming texts and is ignored in others, but it's a simple, useful concept that the C++ language supports. Find out all about it in this sample chapter by Stephen Dewhurst.