After 19 months of development, two name changes and more than 8 million downloads of its preview release, the Firefox browser is finally turning 1.0. Firefox is scheduled to be available for free download at 1 a.m. PDT Tuesday. Our Take: Sky's the limit. After Thunderbird (and third-party NVU & Mozilla-Calendar), I would love to see the Mozilla Project build a multi-IM application (ICQ, AIM/iChat, MSN, Y!, Jabber, etc) with the same design/usability goals as Firefox, coupled with good voice and video support (support which lacks on all third party multi-protocol IM solutions today). UPDATE: It's out.

The second beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, code name "Nahant" is available for download and testing. Announcement, release notes, download location or from a mirror.

Ideally someone else would write this article since I'm connected to DesktopX. But with all the enthusiasm over "widgets" lately and Konfabulator's release on Windows today, I've written up my best attempt at neutrality in looking at the pros of each program.

I've always had mixed feelings about the Open Source movement because while my feelings suggest that this is surely a great innovation in software development, there are other (many) things that I don't agree with. Nevertheless, I've been contributing to free software (or open source) since 1996 and I'm still doing it. Nothing famous or that you might have heard of, though. But enough that I feel I have some insight on the subject.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 for PowerPC systems has been released: 10.1/PPC has many new and updated programs, some new features, and probably also a few new bugs, so something interesting for everyone.

Has Microsoft been trying to retroactively claim IP (intellectual property) rights over many of the Internet's basic protocols? Larry J. Blunk, senior engineer for networking research and development at Merit Network Inc., believes that might be the case.

The final release of FreeBSD 5.3 should be up on the mirrors within the next two weeks. In all likelihood, this will be the first "production release" of FreeBSD 5.x series, so perhaps this is a good time to take a look at the new features in this much anticipated release.

In most cases, functors and ranges cause a minor issue of too many keystrokes, but in some cases, they can cause a serious impediment to maintainability. This chapter will teach you to deal with this problem while it's still a minor one.

Wired aims to be a professional music production and composition software running on Linux.

Both Eclipse 3.0 and IntelliJ IDEA 4 are feature-rich, Java IDEs that provide syntax checking, code assistance, and code generation for coding. In addition, they both provide support for refactoring, Ant, unit testing, and CVS. And soon, the Eclipse Visual Editor 1.0 for building GUIs using either AWT/Swing or SWT will be available. But some important differences exist between the two. This article briefly compares the features, ease of use, and stability of Eclipse and IDEA.

Brad Parker has announced a working emulator for the MIT CADR Lisp Machine. The CADR used a microcode which was designed to run an early version of MacLisp. Many things are working, including ZMacs, its version of Emacs.

Beginning this month, Microsoft will start to publish details about upcoming security updates in a newsletter available to the general public. Previously this information had been available, but only to those who knew about it and would sign a confidentiality agreement, which ended up being a handful of its largest customers.

Fedora Core 3, codenamed Heidelberg, was released this morning. FC3 features Gnome 2.8, KDE 3.3, and Linux kernel 2.6.9, as well as the introduction of Firefox and Thunderbird in Fedora. The ISO's can be found on the many mirrors, and the torrent is here.

Novell is announcing a new Linux desktop today, called "Novell Linux Desktop 9: Powered by SUSE Linux." More info at Newsforge and News.com.