In the latest episode of LugRadio, they discuss whether the involvement of large corporations, such as Novell, is a good thing for open source software. It gets quite heated, as two sides emerge - one that hates corporatism, and the other that can't see a future without a more professional approach.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday a program that will pay some transition costs for companies that want to move from Novell's NetWare operating system onto servers running Windows. Microsoft sees the uncertainty surrounding NetWare's future as an opportunity to win more customers over to Windows Server 2003. Some Novell customers are concerned that the company's focus on Linux could result in the abandonment of NetWare.

Few impressions and tips after a Gentoo 2004.3 installation. A couple of screenshots included.

BeOSFrance features a review of Zeta Neo. ZetaNews has a translation.

Linux laptop support has been in my experience abysmal at best. Things that just work when running Windows XP are either horribly broken, or simply not implemented at all under Linux. Many Linux distributions have little or no real ACPI support. Imagine using your laptop without a battery meter, or any noticeable fan control whatsoever. Due to the lack of mature ACPI support in most modern distributions, I have had to deal with a very large amount of suffering.

The Xfce project just released the first release candidate of the upcoming Xfce 4.2 desktop environment. A whole bunch of bugs have been fixed since the last beta release and the panel window behaviour was changed slightly. A complete list of changes between 4.0 and 4.2RC1 is available here. The source tarballs and binary packages for several Linux distributions are available from the download page. Updated graphical installation wizards are available from the os-cillation website.

Passwords will soon be a thing of the past, replaced by biometric and smart-card technology, Bill Gates reiterated on Tuesday. He also detailed his company's plan for computer management software and announced a long-awaited Windows update tool.

It was revealed that recent lack of updates of Slackware -Current has been caused by Patrick Volkerding's serious dicease. Read more at here. Pat asks for help.

After 2 years of development, there is now a BSD-licensed web services technology that competes with the allegedly overcomplex Microsoft SOAP technology: XINS. XINS is heavily based on Java and XML. Main design goals include simplicity, scalability and testability. Features include transaction logging, log documentation, and automatic generation of HTML docs, test forms, client-side and server-side code. A comprehensive user guide is available.

While Suse 9.2 Pro was announced close to a month ago, it was only made available for purchase recently. I was originally going to compare Suse 9.2 to something like RedHat WS 3.0. However, both Novell/Suse and RedHat seem to now be offering a corporate desktop solution and a "desktop for the masses" solution.

Anyone who registers with Sun will be able to use Solaris for free on servers with x86 processors, said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software business. It's not a totally free lunch, though: Sun will provide security updates in the free version but will charge an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support.

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.

Last year IBM introduced a cut-down POWER4 CPU called the PowerPC 970 and Apple promptly put it into their PowerMac line. IBM are not standing still; the POWER5 is out and rumours have long hinted at a successor to the 970 being in development. What should we expect?

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.