Microsoft made a minority investment on Monday in Unix/Linux management vendor Vintela on Monday. Neither Microsoft nor Lindon, City, Utah-based Vintela would comment on the size of the investment. But sources said the amount was under $10 million. Vintela has acted a key participant in Microsoft's Unix/Linux interoperability strategy. Nonetheless, Vintela is an unlikely Microsoft partner. Update: I hope to interview someone from Vintela this week, and ask them about their relationship with SCO (other than having the same investor). If you have any other burning questions, please suggest them in the comments.

Michael Tiemann recently took some time to do an email interview with LinuxQuestions.org.

Gartner Dataquest’s preliminary worldwide server shipment estimates for the third quarter of 2004 reveal that the market achieved its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year growth. Apple continued to re-establish itself in the server market, according to the analyst. After having above-average growth in the second quarter of 2004, Apple grew shipments 119 percent year over year.

Learn about the support that the .NET Compact Framework provides programs for creating graphical output, including limitations and how to supplement the programs with the help of GDI functions.

The SCO Group's legal actions against Linux have shed light on the inner workings of the open-source programming project and on the operations of a company desperate to survive. They've also created a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists over Microsoft's role in the affair.

Tom has reviewed the Novell Linux Desktop, a new desktop for enterprise customers.

From CP/M to OpenVMS, one of the best things to do with a Linux box is to run programs for other operating systems on it. It can simplify your life considerably. Emulations of a wide variety of operating systems are available for Linux. More than mere academic exercises, these "hosted OSes" are practical investments for many server rooms. Also see Cameron Laird’s notes on emulators.

Sun's upping the ante against Linux with Solaris 10. First, it will be available free for download, with a pay-for-support model. Also, a feature called Project Janus allows users "to create a virtual container inside Solaris in which they can run Linux applications."

GNU Classpath includes all native methods and core classes necessary for a completely functional Java runtime. This release features X.509 certificate path checking, signed JAR file support, full java.awt.color implementation, java.beans 1.4 updates, an improved build process, better AWT focus management, much faster and better fonts support, AWT Choice fixes, HTTP POST fixes, better collection documentation, Calendar bugfixes, lookahead support for regular expressions, fixes for jtree, and improved Eclipse 3 support.

The Genesi-owned/sponsored Morphos.net website (Google cache) has been taken down and instead, a page, that reminds us a lot of the Amiga situation up to a few months ago, is described there. It claims that no new version of MorphOS will be released until payments are made to developers. The latest version of MorphOS is almost a year old already, while releases used to happen every few months in the past, usually.

Anders Carlsson of Imendio outlines and explains (copy of the text) the API changes that are coming with the Gnome 3.0 release in the future. On other toolkit news, GTK# 1.0.4 and beta 1.9.0 (wrapping around Gnome 2.6) was released recently. You can rate GTK# here. Update: On yet another toolkit news, the latest release of the Ruby language bindings for Gnome, adds support for GnomePrint, GnomePrintUI, librsvg and Atk 1.7. Rate Ruby-Gnome here.

Gentoo is proud to present the world with Gentoo Linux 2004.3. Read more of the announcement.

JNode.org has released a new intermediate version of the JNode.org Java Operating System. This release contains a major update of the GUI system. The GUI is now capable of running simple AWT and Swing programs.

Removable media devices are here to stay. Their ease of use and low cost have made them ubiquitous in the work environment – but at what price? In this article they look at the pros and cons of removable media, and the steps IT managers can take to mitigate the security risks associated with them.