This article presents a multiple ways to keep the FreeBSD operating system up-to-date. It takes a FreeBSD 5.2.1 RELEASE system through a subset of security advisories to explain the different sorts of patches an administrator might apply.

The biggest obstacle facing widespread adoption of the Firefox browser is lazy programming – not from the Mozilla Foundation but from corporates that have not tested their applications with anything but IE. And this is a good opportunity to remind new OSNews readers about our mobile-friendly site.

A month after the release of Fedora Core 3 (FC3) we have a pretty good idea over its evolution since its first release last year. In fact, we found FC3 to be its best release yet.

In this GNOME 2.9.2 development release is the new 'gnome-menus' module, which you will need. It is a new XDG spec compliant menu system.

For tracking down memory leaks and other performance issues, the ease and flexibility of Valgrind may make up for slow runtimes. Memory and performance problems plague most of us, but tools are available that can help. One of the best, most powerful and easiest to use is Valgrind. One thing stands out when you use Valgrind--you do not need to recompile, relink or modify your source code. Also have a look at KCacheGrid and Alleyoop which work with valgrind.

In this article we'll examine the range of choices available for Linux network file systems. While the choices are many, we'll see that Linux still faces significant innovation challenges; yesterday's network paradigm isn't necessarily the best approach to the network of tomorrow.

Word is that IBM is seeking to sell off its PC business. The company is said to be in talks with Lenovo. IBM could get between $1 and $2 billion for its PC unit. The company wants to focus on the more lucrative enterprise and server solutions.

GTK+ 2.4.14 was released among stable and unstable versions of atk, glib, pango. This version includes some major speedups on the GtkUIManager code. You can rate the toolkit here. Update: GTK+ widget update in the documentation.

Apple today released Security Update 2004-12-02, which includes a number of security enhancements and updated components for Mac OS X.

Xen, an open-source project with growing ties to Red Hat, Novell and Hewlett-Packard, is emerging as the leading contender for providing open-source virtualization for the Linux environment.

Early Wednesday morning 1 December, our colleagues at The Inquirer ran a story entitled “HP expected to drop Trucluster from HP-UX” on their web site. According to the story, unnamed sources claimed that HP soon will announce that TruCluster technology is unlikely to be incorporated into HP-UX. More here.

The $11.6-billion Sun Microsystems Inc, will soon unveil a brand new subscription-based pricing model for its Solaris 10 operating system (OS) in India. The Solaris 10 price plans will be determined based on the total number of CPUs (central processing units) at client locations and will be computed annually. Also, Solaris 10 ably equipped with fixes and features. Update: More on Solaris.

Stefan Westerfeld, the author of arts, the media fromework for KDE 2.x and KDE 3.x, has written a nice piece on why many of the technical assumptions that he held while developing that software do not hold true. He then shares his insight into the future of media in KDE 4.0 and the free desktop world.

Surfing the Web has never been more risky. Simply connecting to the Internet — and doing nothing else — exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.