In a move dear to the hearts of conspiracy theorists, Microsoft has taken a minority position in Vintela Inc, a sister company of the SCO Group by virtue of the Canopy Group, their common investor.

The Fedora project was urged to be more community oriented and the editor showed an example of how community involvement helps to reduce Fedora boot time. Also, some intro on Sun's Solaris 10 over at LWN.

Novell hints at a conference all that Sun may not be able to open up solaris so easily since Novell claims copyrights and patents remain with Novell. Is this preventing the development of what may be the most powerful open source operating system in existance?

A company named Tech Source has stepped up to create an open source 2D/3D graphics card. The project has an open mailing list and a spec proposal for the final card can be downloaded here. This project is a groundbreaking effort at creating truely open hardware, and is great chance for everyone who is interested in 2D/3D programming to see how a modern graphics card works.

This article will show you how to encrypt the filesystem and mount it with ACL (Access Control Lists), which gives you rights beyond the traditional read (r), write (w), and execute (x) permissions for the three user groups "file", "owner", and "other".

'After several months, amidst various delays and other issues, this author has had the opportunity, at long last, to install and evaluate the latest iteration of Lycoris' Desktop LX, Amethyst 1.4.' Read the rest here.

"What do you want from a desktop operating system? The real criteria are stability, package management, hardware compatibility, and the people behind the software, the community. For its superiority in those areas, I made Debian my workstation OS." Read the article at NewsForge.

Today yellowTAB announced that a service pack for Zeta Neo should be out sime time around the end of the month. Besides fixing unnamed bugs, this pack is also reported to improve PPP performance for both dial-up and xDSL users.

The company is Silicon Graphics Incorporated, or SGI, which once was famous for its high-powered graphics and 3-D workstations but has fallen on hard times of late. SGI now focuses on supercomputers, but there's a tiny coterie of fans dedicated to keeping the company's aging but high-powered workstations alive. On a similar note, the every-three-months maintaince release of Irix is 3 months late.

Something as simple as incrementing an integer can fail in a concurrent environment. This article illustrates the failure scenario and introduces the PowerPC's coping mechanism: atomic instructions. Learn how to close the Window of Death with these assembly-level instructions to update memory correctly, even in the face of concurrency.

There is a new open source library allows hard real time Java applications, without garbage collection and offering faster collections, Strings etc.

Some notes from a Yellowdog 4.0 installation along with some screenshots.

The Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) is a rather new security interoperability standard within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Caleb Sima, SPI Dynamics CTO, talks to Help Net Security about this interesting web application security topic.

Although the C language has been around for close to 30 years, its appeal has not yet worn off. It continues to attract a large number of people who must develop new skills for writing new applications, or for porting or maintaining existing applications.