Some time back, I promised to double-check Sun executive Larry Singer’s “Reality Check” missives on HP. A week ago, Mr. Singer penned a Reality Check that, in light of HP’s decision to cancel its TruCluster integration effort, does in fact reflect more reality than rhetoric. It also reflects Mr. Singer’s opinions, some of which differ from mine. Presented herewith is Larry’s write-up, laced with a few comments of my own.

Symantec Corp., the top global security software maker, on Thursday said it will buy Veritas Software Corp for $13.5 billion, expanding into the data storage and recovery business. More can be found just about everywhere.

GTK+ 2.6, Pango 1.8, and Glib 2.6 have been released. Look for improvements coming to a Gnome or XFCE desktop near you soon.

In a special report on IBM's Power5 Processor family, the bigger, badder cousin of the G5 PowerPC processor Apple uses in Power Mac and iMac models, InfoWorld predicts that some form of the Power5 will make its way to a Mac soon."PowerPC and Power form a continuum of compatible, and now open, processor designs," writes reported Tom Yaeger, "and our guess is that the Power5 design will arrive in some form in an Apple machine in 2005.

"Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 is billed as "an intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box and offers unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows". So it's pretty clear what the market of the product is - all the millions of Windows users that are fed up with an unstable operating system, want something for email and web browsing, and be able to create, edit and send the boss their Word, Excel and Visio files." Read the rest at linuxlinks.com.

According to at least one company, in order for Sun to gain credibility in the Linux market, they must acquire either Red Hat or Novell. Merrill Lynch hypothesizes that with one of these companies as an asset, the Opteron market is theirs for the taking, and without one, they are doomed to cater to mostly Solaris customers.