FUDCon 2, the second gathering of Fedora Users and Developers, has been held at LinuxTag, on the 24th and 25th of June in Karlsruhe, Germany. FUDCon 2 features presentations from prominent members of the Fedora Project, both from Red Hat and from the Fedora community. LinuxTag also has a nice write-up of FUDCon 2. The presentations are expected to be made available on the FUDcon pages soon.

IBM, Sony and Toshiba have jointly ported Linux to the Cell processor, the 4GHz multi-core PowerPC chip they co-developed. The Cell CPU is slated to ship in Sony's Playstation 3 next spring, but is likely to appear before that in workstations, embedded computing devices, and supercomputers. The Cell's Linux port includes a 64-bit PowerPC Linux kernel, along with a filesystem that abstracts the Cell's independent vector processing units so that the Linux kernel can make use of them. The companies hope their Cell Linux port will be merged into the next mainstream Linux kernel release, 2.6.13.

Apple has refreshed it's line of iPods today. All iPods now boast a color screen similar to the iPod Photo. Also, iTunes 4.9 has been released with support for podcasting. Mac users can use Software Update, Windows users can download it here. And the new iTunes release is riddled with references to the iTunes phone, says AppleInsider.

After downplaying the importance of the emerging Ajax programming model, Microsoft Corp. has decided to jump with booth feet into the Ajax fray. On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled "Atlas," a Web client framework that is designed to support multiple DHTML controls with JavaScript code.

Eclipse version 3.1 is now available. New features added in this release: full support for Java 5.0 and improved support for developing rich client applications.

Here it is again the AROS news update, for more fresh news check out the forum.

"The NetBSD-Office Project is an approach to provide NetBSD users a common, preconfigured and ready to use Office Environment. The installation CDROM is a modified NetBSD 2.0 installation CD-ROM, which installs the Operating System and a set of preselected third party programs in one step, including preconfiguration for an easy startup. Or short: install - reboot - start using KDE." A new release with KDE 3.4.1 as well as screenshots is at the side project's website.

Tom Adelstein has done some digging. It looks like the Microsoft-connected law firm that does heavy lobbying and the dirty work of the BSA, Preston, Gates & Ellis, has some curious connections within the ethics inquiry into the activities of Congressman Tom Delay (R-Texas). Let's see how this plays out. Full Blog | LXer.com

"Today, we are open-sourcing Sun's server side implementation of Java," Schwartz told an audience of about 10,000 software developers and Sun partners. "This is the first step in open-sourcing all of Sun's Java software assets." It will be released under Sun's CDDL.

In a long-awaited decision that could have stark repercussions for P2P networks, the United States Supreme Court on Monday gave record labels and movie studios a green light to sue file-sharing services such as Grokster and Morpheus, which maintained they were not responsible for the actions of their users.

Rexx is a scripting language that was invented at IBM years ago. The Linux community has largely ignored Rexx, but I believe it could play an important role in Linux's challenge to the Windows desktop. How can a language many in the Linux community have never even heard of be valuable in Linux's fight for the desktop?

Mesa3D has been imported into the Haiku sourcetree: "A first draft of Haiku's OpenGL kit started his life yesterday when I've imported large portions of Mesa3D's BeOS port into our source tree."

Gary Benson (Red Hat) has made available Jonas in the Fedora Java development list (screenshot). Along with the large number of free and open source Java packages made available in Fedora Core 4 already, more are being added to rawhide compiled with GCJ. These include Lucene, additional Jakarta components, and more. You can read the rawhide reports in Fedora Test to track the rolling development updates.

Many times, you need to know how a certain filesystem looked like at some point in time, and you want to be able to roll back changes that happened to it after that point. While there are multiple solutions to achieve this goal, certainly one of them is to use filesystem snapshots. One of the capabilities of unionfs is to offer the possibility of consistently freezing the status of the filesystem at any given point in time (snapshot). Read more...