"Anyone who dislikes the non-standard desktops of many distributions will feel right at home with Libranet, and the .deb packaging system will keep the Debian nerds happy. Those of you searching for a server-oriented distribution should look elsewhere, but if you're searching for a strong desktop/multimedia distribution, Libranet is one of the best choices available." Read more at NewsForge.

Microsoft is advancing its 64-bit agenda with the addition of some new AMD Opteron computers.

The EDE Team presents version 1.0.2 of the Equinox Desktop Environment and version 2.0.4 of the Extended Fast Light Toolkit (eFLTK).

The Free Standards Group has decided to move away from a single, core LSB (Linux Standards Base) specification, and is instead going to break this down into different modules that can be combined to give a server or desktop LSB standard. Elsewhere, Bill Gates has sent an email to all Microsoft's corporate customers warning that those in search of technological interoperability shouldn't look towards open source software.

HURD developer Marcus Brinkmann made a historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on HURD-L4.

A forthcoming update to the Linux 2.6 kernel will incorporate the Xen open source virtualization technology, said the man who maintains the Linux kernel.

Bookpool.com has posted an excerpt from Knuth's long awaited The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4. It is very short and discusses combinatorial searching.

Sun Microsystems has raised the possibility that it might offer customers its own database, a move that could trigger displeasure at Oracle but curry favor with open-source advocates.

GTK+ is now the first major toolkit to depend on the Cairo vector graphics library which is designed to provide high-quality display and print output. Cairo will add 3 more dependencies to GTK: itself, glitz and libpixman (after atk, Pango, Glib, FontConfig and the standard X libs). The addition is now part of the HEAD of GTK's CVS. Some might argue that Cairo should have been integrated to X instead (as an extension or as part of the core), so all toolkits would get the benefits, transparently (if enough engineering was to go into this). I sent an email to selected GTK+ developers last May about this, and here is what Owen Taylor, GTK's project leader, replied: Update: GTK+ 2.6.2 released.

Most software has far more features than most users will want. These extra features simply serve to increase the TCO of software deployments and headaches at the helpdesk. OFB Editor-in-Chief Timothy R. Butler argues that GNU/Linux developers would do well to follow the examples of Apple and Mozilla and move lesser used features out of the way.

LismoreSystems released today their x86 emulator for PPC. Prices start at $69.

The IBM Rational Application Developer for Linux trial download enables developers with diverse technical backgrounds, and even those unfamiliar with Java, to quickly build rich, data-driven applications.

TheRegister analyzes the cell processor architecture: Part I, Part II. Also, this one is of interest too.

Anton Tomov distributes a number of capable programs for the Windows Mobile platform including Pocket Hackmaster and Pocket Mechanic. It appears that Mr. Tomov recently distributed an update to the Pocket Mechanic program that includes some 'malicious' anti-piracy code. The program apparently detects if the executed program is a legally licensed one and if not it erases your entire Windows Mobile device by hard-resetting it. It has reportedly wiped out a removable storage card, too. Update: Anton Tomov disregarded this report in a private email as "nonsense" and as "a campaign led by a couple of people who are trying to hurt the perfect reputation of my name and the quality of the products I write".