The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-BETA1, which marks the beginning of the FreeBSD 5.4 release cycle.

The KDE Bluetooth Framework is a set of tools built on top of Linux' Bluetooth stack BlueZ. It provides easy access to the most common Bluetooth actions. The first beta of the upcoming 1.0 version is available for testing. My Take: I had a quick look and I was positively surprised by the level of depth and abilities offered in this beta (notification icon & daemon, action's kio addons, kcontrol pref panels, konqueror registered protocol, other utils). However, much work remains to be done in the usability department, as it's pretty complicated to do anything more than send a file to another Bluetooth device (many of the related dialogs are scattered in many places and they feel disconnected).

Linux offers an excellent alternative for businesses looking for something different in an OS. However, Linux with all of its components and options installed can be a massive resource hog. Enter "thin clients," pared-down Linux installations, which offer a streamlined OS for lighter system usage.

A new FreeVMS release is available and a new bliss compiler is available in this release.

Bare Feats, a popular site devoted to Mac vs PC benchmarks, benchmarked Doom 3 on the Mac to investigate what are the issues with Mac's slower performance in Doom 3 compared to the PC. They even contacted the developers responsible for the port who explained that it indeed has to do with Mac's architecture, gcc's slower optimizations and the OS X itself. From the article: "PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed."

Ark Linux has released its first stable version: after 3 years of development and testing, the Ark Linux team have decided to release the first stable version, Ark Linux 2005.1.

Aditya Nag recently got the chance to ask the OpenOffice.org team a few questions about OpenOffice.org in general, and their upcoming release. The interview is fairly long and detailed, and there are a few interesting tid-bits, like Louis' assertion that there will come a day when there will be no proprietory file formats for Office Suites.

"It's a sad day when an ancient fork bomb attack can still take down most of the latest Linux distributions." Read through this article at Security Focus for more.

With the recent push from OpenBSD to open firmwares to redistribution as well as obtaining new documentation for several wireless chipsets it would seem OpenBSD is pushing for other areas to open up as well.

'Obfuscation' is to make something difficult or unusually obscure. One of the ironies of Ruby programming is the general desire of Rubyists to believe that a goal to accomplish readability in code overshadows even at times its functionality. At times to the point of obsurdity. Enter the International Obfuscated Ruby Code Contest with prizes up to $750.

With an April 12 deadline fast approaching for the large-scale rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft offers some free help to smooth the migration for large enterprise customers.

Nikolaos S. Karastathis of Wikinerds has interviewed Marcus Brinkmann, one of the main Hurd developers. It's an insightful interview into Marcus offering a look at how he got started hacking in general and on the Hurd in particular, his version of the recent history of Hurd development, and where he thinks the Hurd is going (hint: away from Mach and towards L4). The presentations from the Hurd developers' mini-Symposium at FOSDEM 2005 makes for good supplemental reading.

Microsoft's much anticipated and frequently postponed OS may ultimately lack compelling reasons for customers to upgrade.

KMOS, Inc. announced that it has completed all registrations to change its corporate identity to Amiga, Inc. Amiga also announced the launch of AmigaAnywhere version 1.5 and mentions a new Amiga SDK under development. For some background information with regard to this technology and a summary of past developments have a look here. Coming Sunday AmigaWorld.net will arrange a Q&A IRC session with Amiga's CEO.