In the second of a three-part series, David and Brad build on their first article on R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. R is both a strongly functional programming language and a general environment for statistical exploration of data sets. Now that our data is shipshape, we will delve into the functionality of the language.

The first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.1 for AMD64 and Intel EM64T is available. More info here.

Winter has ended in Melbourne but I'm not the sort to venture out without at least a sweater. However, the cold doesn't seem to bother Theo de Raadt as Sam Varghese sit in the lobby of the city's Duxton Hotel, a day after the end of the annual summit of the Australian Unix and Open Source User Group.

Freddie Kavanagh, Novell's chief technology officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, gave attendees an update on the progress of Open Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Desktop, the two major products intended to bring together Novell's legacy customers with technology acquired from Ximian and SuSE. Both are expected by the end of this year, although Novell expects OES to make more of an immediate impact than the desktop.

Sam Hiser is taking a look at Sun's Java Desktop System, from the Enterprise and Java point of view.

In response to a recent bug report on the lkml, Jeff Garzik, the maintainer of the Serial ATA subsystem and network device drivers, had some harsh words for kernel preemption. In the bug report it was mention that kernel preemption was enabled to which Jeff replied, "I strongly recommend disabling kernel preemption. It is a hack that hides bugs". The comment lead into an interesting discussion.

Modern operating systems give you the possibility to encrypt filesystems. Or virtual filesystem as the loopback ones. This article discuss two ways of getting an encrypted loopback on linux.

I believe that many IT CEOs want to beat down Microsoft in the new embedded systems market, but they always encounter numerous obstacles.

In this interview, Chris Schlaeger, Vice President R&D for SUSE/Novell and long time KDE contributer, talks about Novells desktop plans, OpenOffice.org Integration, Groupwise support in KDE's instant messanger Kopete, the Kontact groupware client as well as the integration of the Gecko rendering engine into Konqueror. He also shares interesting opinions and ideas for the future of KDE.

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Many things have changed since 1.0. The R language has acquired namespaces, exception handling constructs, formal methods and classes, much improved garbage collection, generalized I/O via connection objects, and considerable improvements in the graphics area. The user workspace has been reorganized, and so has the set of packages that ship with R. Several "recommended packages" deemed indispensable in a statistical system are bundled.

Novell has claimed that its forthcoming SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 distribution will appeal to "Linux newcomers" as well as technical enthusiasts. Also, Novell's Nat Friedman, vice-president of its desktop technology group, said open source vendors work off a modular, flexible development model that allows them to deliver new features to customers more regularly than Microsoft. Novell has also said Microsoft's Longhorn delay will give it more time to push iFolder, which, like WinFS, stores data in a user's real file system and tracks metadata in a separate location.

The past few years have been a roller coaster ride for Paris-based Mandrakesoft, which filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2003, emerged in March 2004 with a nine-month plan to repay its creditors, thanks in part to the company's first profitable quarter in the Q4 2003. Read the interview here. Elsewhere, a new version of the Mandrakelinux live CD, "Move", has been released.

Turbolinux today announced the anticipated release of Turbolinux 10 Server (10S). Turbolinux 10S significantly expands on the high performance capabilities of its first-generation predecessor, Turbolinux 8 Server, released in October of 2002.

The first bootable release of McOS Re 0.4.1 is available. McOS Re is a project dedicated to the re-creation of the Traditional Mac OS. The first goal is to be source- and binary-compatible with native PowerPC code for Mac OS.