The fourth release candidate of FreeBSD 5.4 is out. This will be the last Release Candidate, unless a major problem is discovered as part of RC4 testing the final release will be made early next week. This RC contains fixes to all known major issues.

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

With servers, where there is a good economic model, Linux would clearly remain favored over Apple because of much deeper support from companies like HP and IBM. But on the desktop, for most users, Tiger is the clear winner. It has better desktop application bundles, better customer support, better hardware, good value and is easier to use. Read more here. Also, firm expects Apple to grab 4% US market share.

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

One of the smaller features Windows users will appreciate is Linspire's global spell checker. No matter what application you are using, you will find that suspected misspellings are underlined and suggested corrections are only a click away.

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.

eXpert Zone Founder, Andrew Youll (youlle) has posted about a document he has found on the net detailing the history of "non-UNIX" oses in a timeline it also shows relationships between oses and shows which projects have borrowed from where or which oses have "compatibility" with other projects.

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.

MadPenguin offers a first look at Mandriva LE along some screenshots.

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.

Depending on how you apply them, roaming profiles can do anything from making your life easier to saving your bacon. If a user needs access from all over the building, roaming profiles are a convenience. If you have 50 users and only 10 computers, roaming profiles are an easy solution. If an entire department's computers die in the middle of a critical project, roaming profiles are a lifesaver.

MorphOS version 1.4.5 is now available. This is hopefully the last bugfix update before the next full release, and solves many bugs and problems with the previous releases.

This release specifically introduces the database management application Kexi, the image editor Krita and upgrades the major KOffice components to use the OASIS Open Document format, an industry standard allowing better interoperability across applications and platforms.

"Friday evening, 18:00 CET, Apple released Mac OS 10.4 'Tiger' to us Europeans. I attended a 'launch event' (which is a posh means of saying free drinks and snacks) at an Apple Center in Berlin to be among the first mortals to see and use it. They had set up various Macs with the much anticipated new version of Mac OS. After playing around for a while, making good use of the free drinks and snacks, I shelled out the €120,- (somehow they didn't charge €129,-) and walked out a happy, but poorer, man." eXpert Zone takes a quick look at Tiger.