Kommander is a powerful but easy to learn development environment. "Graphical Scripting with Kommander" takes us through the creation of a graphical interface for Konstruct, a tool for downloading, configuring and installing KDE from source packages. The article also lists some of the exciting developments coming to Kommander in the near future.

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.

According to new benchmarks NetBSD's performance has increased. In this benchmark NetBSD surpassed FreeBSD in nearly every test.

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.

NewsForge has published an interview with several prominent NetBSD developers: "NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports 52 system architectures . . . To celebrate the release, we've asked several well-known NetBSD developers to comment on some of NetBSD 2.0's new features." Read the interview here.

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."

MySQL, at the end of January, is expected to release a beta version of its MySQL 5.0 open source database, which is to feature enterprise-level functionality such as stored procedures and triggers, according to a company representative.

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.

The Linux server platform is becoming more varied -- and more capable, according to a recent report by IDC. The report noted that Linux is already well entrenched as a Web-centric server platform, in IT infrastructure roles and in the high-performance computing arena. In 2005, the report predicted, Linux will take on more workloads in the enterprise, such as hosting independent software vendor applications and databases.

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.

Mandrakesoft just released Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop. They come from a specific development effort to make them "enterprise-ready". The two products feature longer development cycles and a 5-year maintenance span. Read the press release.

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.

Matchbox is a base environment for the X Window System running on non-desktop embedded platforms such as handhelds, set-top boxes, kiosks and anything else for which screen space, input mechanisms or system resources are limited. Version 0.9 was released today.

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