Intel's high-end Itanium chip is not making the kinds of inroads that Intel had hoped. It's Xeon chip still rules the roost for servers. In response, the company will be launching a program that lets potential users try out Itanium hardware before they buy. A ZDNet article covers where Intel's going with the Itanium and Xeon.

Kompose' is an Expose'-like (OS X) full screen task manager for KDE that has just gone to release 0.4.1 in two months. You really have to see it to understand, but imagine that tiny little box in your taskbar that indicates all our running windows blown up and on the entire desktop. Then add a tiny screenshot for each app. For those without an OS X box around we have provided these screenshots of Kompose' in action.

Jim Allchin is group vice president of Microsoft’s Platforms Group and has overall responsibility for the Windows operating system. He talks about Longhorn, security, 64 bit, open source, and life at Microsoft. Read the interview.

Tim O'Reilly has spoken often over the last year about how to apply the ideals of open source with the slow and eventual shift from dependence on software to dependence on information. The new software is 'infoware'. In Applying Distributed XML toward The Open Source Paradigm Shift to Infoware, I propose that we can preserve the freedoms to innovate with data and to fork infoware by working with locally hosted xml files like we do with RSS.

DesktopOS published a Libranet GNU/Linux 2.8.1 review. The author describes the installation, configuration and community of Libranet, and gives some good tips as well.

Longhorn's woes may open a door for Linux—a very tiny door—but Linux just isn't a good choice for desktops. Instead, desktop Linux proponents should wake up and switch to the Mac OS.

Togaware has published an extensive online book to help aspiring Debian users find their way around setting up a Linux desktop workstation.

Wireless PCs and wireless laptops are being increasingly used in both business and the home. . . Unfortunately, in the enthusiasm with which people have adopted wireless, the question of security has been seriously overlooked.

When the UK's defense contractor for the Navy decided to standardize on Windows, it "prompted strong internal opposition from some , who had a sound background in Unix and who had, despite resource starvation and a companywide policy to standardise on Windows, been investigating open source alternatives as a foundation for future combat systems. They lost."

Ask some end users what Linux Standard Base (LSB) is and most likely they either won't know anything about it, or know a little bit but not enough to qualify as understanding what all the buzz around LSB is about. Ask three ISVs and only one will likely understand the implications of LSB for their business. And only a very, very few will say that they have started the process of making some of their applications LSB-compliant. Read More.

FreeBSD has released a new Beta of 5.3. Release notes can be viewed at here.

With Microsoft's release of Virtual PC 7.0 to manufacturing this week, several sources close to the Redmond-based software giant were able to obtain finalized copies of the product. A collection of screenshots from the soon-to-be released emulation software package are included in an exclusive AppleInsider photo gallery.

Athene is a desktop system for Linux that uses its own graphics drivers for high speed access to your graphics card. On version 4.1, resolution and display management functionality were improved. File and folder security information were added to the file manager. New hot-keys such as alt-tab window focusing were added. Dead-key support for international keyboards was added. Some bugs have also been fixed.

Linux began as a labor of love by hippies and hackers. Now the suits are cutting checks and running the show. This pay-for-play arrangement may be standard operating procedure among high-tech companies and academic labs, but it represents a big change for Linux, which first gained favor among hippie-esque programmers who disdained revenue and profit, advocating a "peace, love and software" vision of Linux as a free operating system developed without regard for corporate interests.