Sun Microsystems told NewsForge/ITMJ Thursday that it intends to open source a small but important new feature in Solaris 10 -- Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a new framework for troubleshooting the network and tuning system performance in real time.

Slackware 10.1-Beta1 is now released for those who want to upgrade to the -Current tree. The final version is expected soon.

Federico Biancuzzi interviewed FreeBSD Core member Scott Long about the SMPng technology, the current implementation status, future goals, and plans.

The MorphOS front-end software, Ambient, is now free, full with source code. Download here.

You'll see that the underlying reason in almost every case where the Mac lost out to Wintel doesn't have anything to do with rational arguments based on cost, performance or functionality. Instead, Wintel proponents are shown as consistently fudging such arguments as rationales for decisions already made.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. Contrary to conventional wisdom, unreliability is not an essential characteristic of complex software programs. In this 4-page article, Louis Savain will propose a silver bullet solution to the software reliability and productivity crisis. The solution will require a radical change in the way we program our computers.

Neil C. has committed a first release of the AROS native TCP/IP stack to the CVS.

The Ruby community is abuzz about Rails, a web application framework that makes database-backed apps dead simple. What's the fuss? Is it worth the hype? Curt Hibbs shows off Rails, building a simple application that even non-Rubyists can follow.

A new development ISO image of the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 5.04 ("Hoary") has been released.

In the early days of programming, non-reentrancy was not a threat to programmers; functions did not have concurrent access and there were no interrupts. In many older implementations of the C language, functions were expected to work in an environment of single-threaded processes. Now, however, concurrent programming is common practice, and you need to be aware of the pitfalls.

There is a nice Flash tutorial for java swing-threading subject. Explaining why some swing applications are not responsive, and ways of resolving those problems.

X11 (the X Window System) is a widely-used graphical user interface on UNIX. Read this article to learn how to set up and use X11 applications on your Mac OS X system.

Linux Journal is running a telling chapter excerpt from the book, "Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop," (O'Reilly) by Tom Adelstein & Sam Hiser. The excerpt is Chapter 9: "Using Windows Applications with Sun's Java Destkop System". Many people remain blissfully unaware that you can run a growing list of Windows applications on Linux. This development may disturb a certain tidy model of reality but it represents the overthrow of a major obstacle to the widespread adoption of Linux, that of "Application Availability." Full Excerpt | Linux Journal

Maybe you all know the old joke about the definition of a workstation: A trainstation is where a train stops, a bus station is where a bus stops, so a workstation ... In this article I will try to define the workstation market, the current models, what they are used for and some thoughts about their future.