Novell hacker Jan Holesovsky has announced a build of OpenOffice.org that has both KDE and GNOME support. When launched within KDE, KDE support is activated, similarly when launched within GNOME, GNOME support is activated. Jan's next project will be to plan for OOo 2.0.

There is a new open source library allows hard real time Java applications, without garbage collection and offering faster collections, Strings etc.

There's a new DragonFlyBSD "distro". It's called GoBSD and you can download it here.

The Application Vulnerability Description Language (AVDL) is a rather new security interoperability standard within the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Caleb Sima, SPI Dynamics CTO, talks to Help Net Security about this interesting web application security topic.

Paul Thurrott makes claims, based on "internal documentation," that Longhorn Beta 1 will be released on February 16th 2005. However, NeoWin says that it won't be released before May 2005.

Take the poll inside and let us know what you think (javascript required).

This is an analysis comparing Java-Gnome and GTK#, in the source code level. Update: Screenshots from "Free Swing".

Open for Business has an interesting and comprehensive interview with KDE core developer and multimedia guru Scott Wheeler of JuK and TagLib fame. He outlines the future of KDE's multimedia efforts. Looks like things move away from aRts as sound server and multimedia framework to a very open minded best-of-breed strategy for KDE 4.0, with GStreamer being preferred at the moment.

A source close to Microsoft today sent documentation about an Update Rollup for Windows 2000 that the software giant will release in 2005 in lieu of a Service Pack 5 (SP5). Also, Microsoft has announced what it hopes will be a new attack on piracy - the Redmond-based giant has decided to give away free software to those who bought machines with fake copies pre-installed.

Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 may be powerful enough to power a data grid, but for real market growth, Sun is looking inward to the embedded space. Despite the hoopla at this month's announcement party to launch Solaris 10, the focus for the operating system has been outside the usual realm of server rooms and desktops. Solaris Express 11/04 will be build 72 and should be available on or around November 30. The big thing for this one is... 64 bit Solaris on AMD.''

Novell consultant Adrian Malagui explains step-by-step how to apply restrictive policies to Novell Linux Desktop 9, manage Linux users from eDirectory, authenticate through LDAP and store users data and profiles on a central server. See the full PDF article here.

In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Strosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his "theory of patches", what's next, and on using Haskell for the project.

No doubt, all of you have heard of Xfce and those who haven't will hear about it soon anyway. I remember trying out Xfce for the first time back on SuSE 9.0. I am not sure if it came with the distrobution or if I downloaded it. At the time 9.0 came out I remember thinking to myself "nice, good potential, could be eyecandy, fast..." but I still logged into KDE upon booting. Sure I tried Gnome but somehow for a windows-commer KDE was more user friendly at the time. Update: More screenshots of XFce.

I recently downloaded and took a closer look at Novell Linux Desktop 9. While it is certainly aimed at the corporate environment, it's also somewhat suitable for home users. Read our review to find out what experiences I had with it and whether or not it might be right for you.