The much awaited new preview of PCLinuxOS has been released: "PCLinuxOS Preview 8 comes with kernel 2.6.7 with udev support. KDE 3.3.2, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, Firefox 1.0 with plugin support, Thunderbird 1.0, P2P filesharing for Kazza and Gnutella, and many more applications." Read more here. Also, check out the screenshot tour at OSDir.com.

The ubiquity and utility of Ant as a build tool for Java projects is virtually unsurpassed. Even Maven, the new, upstart utility in the build arena, owes much of its power to lessons learned from Ant. This article introduces Groovy's builder utility, which makes it especially easy to combine Groovy with Ant and Maven for more expressive and controllable builds.

Newsforge reviews the effect of recently open sourced databases like IBM's Cloudscape and CA's Ingres and its effect on the classic open source players like MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as the proprietary database leader Oracle

After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems. NewsForge has the review.

Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer, has re-created the entire Commodore 64 on one chip and inserted it into a joystick, with several games, (like the cool Atari-in-a-joystick games) allowing nostalgic thirtysomethings to relive their youths. A NYT/news.com article has an interesting profile of Ellsworth, her creation, and other projects she's worked on.

Fedora PPC is now in test stage, a Fedora Core 3 test was released last week. Here few impressions and screenshots on this test release.

Oreilly has an interview with the developers of Rosegarden, a Linux music application that handles MIDI and audio recording and sequencing, sound effects and synth plugins, and a score editor.

Interview with David Lee, CEO of Cambridge (Mass.)-based Advent Consulting, "A recent Jupiter Research survey shows a growing number of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) using open-source alternatives to Microsoft (MSFT ) products. About 9% of SMBs are using Red Hat (RHAT ) Linux on the desktop, and 7% are using the OpenOffice productivity suite, which contains word processing and spreadsheet programs."

The current changelog informs us that Patrick is back in good health from the strange ailments that affected him previously He also muses about his plans for Slackware 10.1 and kernel 2.6 possibly in Slackware 11.

The first Release Candidate for FreeBSD 4.11 has been made available. Please see the full announcement on the FreeBSD-STABLE mailing list here. The full 4.11 release schedule is here. For the "ULTRA" conserative, this appears to be the last release cycle for the 4.x branch.

The Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org project based on open sourced StarOffice code has released a preview of the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 product. This version touts better MS-Office loading and parsing, strict XML compliant output, a new database program that mimics Microsoft's Access, and much more. The Inquirer took it for a spin.

For a theoretically free operating system, Linux is -- and will continue to be -- a cash cow, a research firm said Wednesday as it predicted the OS will bring in more than $35 billion in revenues by 2008. Framingham, Mass.-based IDC said that overall revenue for servers, desktops, and packaged software running on Linux will reach $35.7 billion in the next four years. Currently, IDC pegs Linux's global total take at just under $15 billion.

I'm not upgrading my Fedora Core 2 machine to Core 3, even though the new version has been out for a couple of months. There's not anything wrong with FC3 itself, it's just that system upgrades are both a blessing and a curse.

Announcing wx.NET v0.6.0 is now available for download in either source form or binary packages for Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. Please review the release notes if you are a current wx.NET developer. You can also jump directly to the SourceForge download page for this release.