Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg gave the highest praise possible to not one but two Apple Computer products in his Thursday Personal Technology column, calling Mac OS X "rock solid" and the G5 iMac "the single best desktop computer I have ever reviewed." Mr. Mossberg used his weekly column to discuss the plague of viruses, spyware and other security problems that primarily affect the Windows platform.

A test release of Fedora Core 3 for PowerPC systems has been announced, more info here.

I just returned from spending three days with the OpenVMS stream of the HP - Intel Developer Forum in Mahwah, New Jersey. The over-subscribed OpenVMS stream was extremely successful, and provided an advanced view of what OpenVMS users can expect from the soon-to-be generally released OpenVMS for HP Integrity Servers. Read article...

MontaVista Software has announced the immediate availability of a MIPS evaluation Linux Support Package (LSP) for MontaVista Linux Professional Edition (Pro), based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and MontaVista Linux Professional Edition 3.1 applications and tools.

If any single program defines the Debian Linux project, that program is apt-get. apt-get is Debian's main tool for installing and removing software. Working with the .deb package format, apt-get offers sophisticated package management that few Red Hat Package Manager RPM-based distributions can match.

KDE has released the first Alpha of what will become KDE 3.4. You download it, read the schedule, look at the planned features, report bugs or help in any other way.

Updates to the production and development versions of Mono have been released. The major features of this release are:

In this article, we will explore the creation of a custom widget for an automotive application using the Zinzala SDK. Introduced in April 2003, Zinzala is a BeOS flavored Software Development Kit for QNX. It has improved since then, taking on small features inspired by the Symbian OS. Because Zinzala brings in the benefits of object oriented programming, it can leverage the quality of your QNX RTOS based embedded products.

This guest editorial by Linux consultant Binh Nguyen is an exercise in "tough love." Nguyen points out key design attributes of Debian that make it one of the strongest and most versatile Linux offerings available. At the same time, he notes several important areas where Debian falls flat. Yet, with a few simple improvements and a more welcoming attitude to new users, Nguyen argues, Debian could turn into the most popular Linux distro around. Elsewhere, Debian Women: Geek feminists in action.

According to a report by the Register, the next version of PalmOS will have "Linux at its core." The Reg suggests that while the core improvements will be open sourced, the top level layers will remain proprietary a la Apple's Aqua interface.

Lee Nackman, IBM VP of Design, Construction, and Test Tools Development and CTO of Rational Software, and Jim Russell, IBM Lotus Software Director of Application Development Tools, explain how IBM is leveraging Eclipse with the Cloudscape Java database and with IBM Workplace Client Technology, Rich Client Edition to become a strong tool for cross-platform deployments.

James Morris, one of the core SELinux developers has a blog entry detailing the evolution of SELinux and how it has worked so far including a recent major performance boost using RCU (Read Copy Update) code in the Linux kernel.

Market share numbers in free software is a rather dubious thing and tend to reflect more often the wishes of the quoter than any true objective measurement. I still dare to claim thought that XMMS has historically been the most used GUI media player on Linux and FreeBSD systems and maybe still is. Still there have been a lot of alternatives popping up all hoping to dethrone XMMS over the years and maybe the time has now come when either there will be no clear leader or someone else will ascend. One of the alternatives I really like is amaroK.

Goldman Sachs initiated coverage of Apple Computer at "in-line," noting that Apple is "one of the few companies in tech with the ability to consistently innovate and then monetize that innovation."