With just a short time before Christmas, you may be wondering what little stocking stuffer you can get for your technically obsessed co-worker, computer savvy boss or geeky family member. It is not too late to pick out a gift that will stay out of the closet of useless gifts after the party's over. Timothy R. Butler looks at five gift ideas at OfB.biz.

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.

David Rhodus has posted an interesting writeup about the intergration of OpenNTPD into DragonFly over at GoBSD.com.

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.

The Kuro Box promises something fairly interesting: a usable single-board PowerPC computer, for only US$160 -- when other PowerPC development boards often cost ten times as much.

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.

Apple has released OS X 10.3.7 via Software Update. Improvements include improved AFP support for saving documents with long file names, improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, improved FireWire device compatibility, updated Preview application, improved compatibility for third party applications, and previous standalone security updates. Read more here.

"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.

It has been a while since Redhat announced the merger with Fedora.us and the formation of a community oriented and supported Fedora project. The process of opening up CVS access to the community is one of the major steps towards that and that has finally happened, according to Red Hat. The build infrastructure internally used by Redhat should open up soon and formation of fedora extras and policies would complete the process.

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.

IT Enquirer has a short preview of Mac OS X 10.4 Server, including screenshots of the new Firewall rules and Stealth Mode and advanced rules.

The overall Linux market is far larger than previous estimates show, a new study says. In an analysis of the Linux market released late Tuesday, market research firm IDC estimated that the Linux market -- including servers, PCs and packaged software -- is expected to register a 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over five years, reaching a whopping $35.7 billion by 2008.

Sun has put its TestingComatiblityKit (TCK) for Java under a "Read-Only-License". This means that you are allowed to look at the source-code but you are not allowed to modify or compile it. For more information, a couple of Sun people's blogs address the subject here and here. For a perspective from outside Sun, see here and here. Read the license here. And retrieve the source code of the TCK here.

The 0.5 release of Visopsys is now available to coincide with the initial public release of "Partition Logic": a small, GPLed, standalone graphical partitioning utility based on Visopsys.