The XFree86 4.5.0 windowing system has been released. Says the website, "It is on our website and ready to download. 4.5.0 was born yesterday and the delivery I hear wa smooth. Get a copy now. It's just terrific....details to follow."

Tony Iams is no stranger to operating systems. A senior analyst with Ideas International in Port Chester, New York, Iams spends much of his time working with users - and vendors - of the latest operating systems. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com sat down with Iams to discuss the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4). In this interview, Iams talks about some of the new features of RHEL 4 and explains the direction the operating system will take in the future.

GNU Classpath is a project to create free core class libraries for use with virtual machines and compilers for Java. Changelog of version 0.14: Base core class library for upcoming GCC 4.0 and Kaffe 1.1.5 releases. ImageIO support through gdkpixbuf, many new nio character encoders and decoders, fully automated class documentation generation, generic VMStackWalker support for runtimes, many bugfixes, optimizations, and new Swing support.

Xen is a paravirtualization technology available for the Linux kernel that lets you enclose and test new upgrades as if running them in the existing environment but without the worries of disturbing the original system. This article shows you how to install a Xen system that will give administrators a valuable sandbox for testing system upgrades (as well as a playground for running multiple virtual machines on the same Linux box).

Mandrakesoft have released the first release candidate of 10.2 for PPC. As with the 10.1 version, 10.2 is created by the community. There is no information on the website yet but the ISO files are available on mirrors. Also, although available since last weekend, the first release candidate of Mandrakelinux 10.2 was finally announced on Mandrakeclub.

Tomas Matousek & Ladislav Prosek talk about their PHP .NET compiler, Phalanger. They don't work at Microsoft, but Charles Torre ran into them at a recent CLR compiler lab held on MS' main campus.

Microsoft may have started shipping its cheaper version of Windows in Asia, but getting support for its low-cost computing vision is still very much a work in progress.

A new initiative has been started to create a BSD Certification: "The BSD Certification Group was formed in January, 2005 to create a BSD certification program that is recognized as the industry standard for administering BSD systems." Involved, among others, is Dru Lavigne of 'BSD Hacks' fame and David Rhodus (as mentioned on the DragonFlyBSD users list).

Tuxmachines has a KDE 3.4 review and declares it to have "more shine and polish than ever experienced with any desktop environment in existance today."

Prex, a portable real-time operating system for embedded systems, is a small, reliable and low power micro kernel designed specifically for the small memory footprint system. Prex 0.1 is the first public release, and includes kernel, syscall library, sample hello world application, and some technical documents.

A PC Magazine story examines the conventional wisdom of Firefox's reputation for security (compared to IE) and finds that it's probably more secure, but that it's not so simple to just say so.

The Mac Mini isn't just competition for Shuttle computers and mini-tower PCs. It's also competition for the much smaller embedded development boards that many users are building custom applications around. Peter Seebach takes a look at the Mac Mini as an embedded development platform.

"The three largest computer makers--Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM--have started selling desktops and notebooks with so-called trusted computing hardware, which allows security-sensitive applications to lock down data to a specific PC."

Periodically we hear someone say that Linux isn't suitable for graphic design work. One common complaint is its lack of an integrated system-wide color management system (CMS). Fortunately today's Linux systems have free cross-platform open source color management alternatives. Happy Note: On an unrelated note, this is our 10,000th story! Took us 3.5 years to get here.