Philip Charles has announced the availability of the K7 series of Debian GNU/Hurd CDs. He says: "The main feature of the K7 set is its quality. I would say it is the best set to date. IMHO, this set could be used to promote GNU". This version features XFree86-4.3 for the first time, resulting in greatly improved X11 support. It is also the first version featuring the hurd package itself built against a recent glibc (current Debian unstable).

Mepis is making the transition to a full-fledged easy-to-use desktop and general-purpose Linux distribution. The following is both an overview and review of this excellent new Linux distribution.

Maintaining and deploying useful FAQs can be a very tedious process. Luckily there are a number of open source FAQ generation and management tools out there that exist to try and make it a bit easier. In The FAQs on FAQs we take a look at some tools and what FAQs demand of administrators.

The Austin Game Conference has emerged as one of the primary conferences for game designers, developers, and entrepreneurs in North America. This year, more than 1400 professionals from over 350 companies attended the conference to discuss the technical and business challenges that face today's game industry.

Sun's 3D desktop dubbed Project Looking Glass, was released under the GPL a few months ago. However, it now seems Sun is looking to patent the Project Looking Glass interface according to this report.

A senior IT executive at a major pharmaceutical company summed up the challenge for Linux at the ZDNet UK IT Priorities conference when he asked one simple question: what are the benefits in migrating from Microsoft to Linux at the desktop?

In Russo's A Response to the Paradox of Choice, I interpret this paragraph to be the crux of his essay:

Newly released is the Platform SDK for Windows XP Service Pack 2 support (includes MDAC 2.8, Tablet 1.7 and Windows Installer 3.0).

Sun just launched the long-waited J2SE 5. Some screenshots for the new Ocean L&F here and here and also here. Moreover, Netbeans 4.0 Beta 2 is also ready to be tested.

Dynamic languages are high-level, dynamically typed open source languages. These languages, designed to solve the problems that programmers of all abilities face in building and integrating heterogeneous systems, have proven themselves both despite and thanks to their independence from corporate platform strategies, relying instead on grassroots development and support. Ideally suited to building loosely coupled systems that adapt to changing requirements, they form the foundation of myriad programming projects, from the birth of the web to tomorrow's challenges.

The decision to stay with UNIX or to migrate to Linux is top of mind for many. So, the question becomes: When does it make sense to stay and when does it make sense to move? CIOupdate put that question to the big three UNIX vendors -- IBM, Hewlett Packard (HP) and Sun -- to understand how they help their customers decide where, when and if a migration makes sense.

Effective immediately, contribs.org and the development and support of the SME Server will be handled by Lycoris. There will be a Lycoris commercial release available within a very short period of time. Elsewhere, Red Hat plans to release the Netscape Enterprise Suite as open-source software in a bid to expand beyond its core product.

Finally Terrasoft released YellowDog Linux 4.0. Six months in development, Yellow Dog Linux v4.0 is built upon Fedora Core 2, offering both KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.6.0 desktops with an all new presentation for both the Installer and post-installed desktop environment. Included apps are OpenOffice 1.1.1, Rhythmbox 0.8.3, Mozilla 1.7 and development tools glibc 2.3.3 and gcc 3.3.3 built upon the 32-bit kernel 2.6.8. A lot of new hardware is supported including G5. Mac-on-linux is also supported. More.

OpenBSD supports several authentication methods besides a simple password. Here are some ways you can keep your systems safe. Also, the new song for the next OpenBSD was released but Theo says that CD sales are very dissapointing.