Red Hat developer Christopher Blizzard, who maintains the Mozilla packages, has a rather extensive blog on the plans for Open Sourcing Netscape servers that Red Hat recently brought out from AOL. Another interesting Blog is on Evince, a new document viewer to replace GPDF and Gnome Ghostview by Redhat developer Bryan Clark.

Opera Software today released the much awaited beta version of its next browser for the Linux platform. The new version includes Fit-to-Window-Width, Fit-to-Paper-Width, improved RSS handling, Start Bar for easy access to main features, and automatic update checks, all presented in a simplified user interface.

Jason Walsh, in an editorial for The Guardian, wonders if the kind of fawning devotion that Mac users have for their computers could persist if the Mac were to achieve more widespread use. For example, fans of the ill-fated Cube and Newton are fanatical, but is it really cool to love an iPod, now that everybody has one? It's a timely question, with the spectre of a low cost mac on the horizon.

Microsoft Corp. has pulled the plug on a version of Windows XP for Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 processor. The move marks the end for Itanium 2 in Windows-based workstations and comes after major hardware vendors abandoned the 64-bit chip for use in workstations.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has been migrating its servers from Solaris to Linux over a period of time with about 30% completed now "When the Merc began considering its Linux deployment more than a year ago, Sun knew it wasn't in a strong position to compete. 'We didn't have a good answer for them,' acknowledges Glenn Weinberg, vice president of the operating platforms group at Sun."

New ReactOS release includes "huge improvements in general and networking and stability" and will be the last 0.2.x release. See the changelog.

Apple is suing thinksecret over recent stories, including the proposed headless Mac. Apple sites specific articles in the suit. It's not crazy to assume the speculative articles are based on good information.

On October 22, 2004, Novell released SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 (abbreviated as SLP9.2 henceforth) targeted at the home user and Linux enthusiast crowd. Since I am already using SUSE 9.1 for my daily work on my IBM laptop, I was quite eager to check out 9.2. SLP9.1 is already a very polished Linux distribution, with tons of software ready to go. So here's a SuSE user's review of 9.2 after several weeks using the new version. Update: Also see some 9.2 screenshots with KDE and Gnome.

Navicat 5.3.1 (a cross-platform MySQL client, available for OS X, Linux and Windows) now offers support for customizable History Log path, resizable Manage User window and improves the import/ export wizards. The database management tool is an integrated GUI tool, which can perform MySQL administration and database development, enabling to import/export to and from different file formats, backup data, transfer database from server to server, create visual sql queries and manage multiple databases on local or remote MySQL server. It also includes a full featured graphical manager for setting the users and access privileges. Download an evaluation.

WSJ's Mossberg reviews Firefox. PC World thinks Firefox gives bloatware-haters hope. A not-quite-reliable, but interesting, claim that IE's share has lost 30% of the browser market.

Games Knoppix is an entertainment-oriented version of the popular Debian-based LiveCD known as Knoppix. The idea behind Games Knoppix is excellent -- a LiveCD that you can give to your friends to show them some of the more frivolous aspects of GNU/Linux. Disappointingly, however, many of the games on the CD do not work, many more are duplicates of the same game, everything is in German, and there are driver problems with both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel options. Linux.com has the review.

The new XServe from Apple has dual 2.3 GHz G5 processors, and starts at $2,999 for a "cluster node" version, designed for use in High Performance Computing.

Newsforge has a interesting interview with the Debian project leaders on the new debian release planned to be released in a short while

The author of the Independent Qt Tutorial has published an example-driven article about Qt 4 beta 1. The text touches the new Designer and some of the code-level changes that will affect application developers.