With KDE 3.2 reaching a status of stable and mature, a lot of work has been going into the next and final release of the 3.x series, 3.3. Because 3.3 recently hit beta status, NewsForge caught up with KDE developer George Staikos to talk about all things KDE.

HP World HP will be a pitching a story of Unix harmony and advancement at its HP World user conference here this week. First up, HP has now released HP-UX 11i V2 for both its Itanium and PA-RISC based servers. This means PA-RISC customers no longer have to wait until HP-UX 11i V3 arrives to use the same operating system as their Itanium counterparts. The bad news, however, is that both sets of customers will have to wait until the second half of next year to get their hands on V3 - a product once due at the end of this year.

This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge.

Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) introduces a number of new features that help increase the performance and the security of your system. These changes also affect the operations and functionality of some programs.

This whitepaper by Bill von Hagen discusses how graphical tools can help developers create Linux filesystems and manage application packages and library dependencies. It uses TimeSys tools to illustrate several points, but is largely vendor neutral in its explanation of concepts fundamental to embedded Linux development.

This article describes the system startup and installation processes for the Solaris Operating System and explains how to modify them to change the location from which the Solaris product is installed.

When you're through with this chapter, you'll know not only how to use SOAP straight out of the box but also how to extend SOAP to support your diverse and changing needs. You'll have also followed the development of a meaningful e-commerce Web service in Java.

Learn how to use C++ code to create basic animated graphics in this chapter from "Beginning Game Programming" by Michael Morrison.

Tired of seeing a prosaic, two-dimensional splashscreen every time you boot your system? Sun Microsystems recently released to developers early code for Project Looking Glass, a 3D desktop enhancement application Sun hopes will soon liven up a desktop near you.

Australian Peter Mitchell has written up a description of his efforts to use XDarwin in combination with KDE. In his article, he describes the command line installation steps for running GNOME and KDE using XDarwin as the windowing layer. He describes both the challenges he faced and some suggestions as to the best order in which to install the various components necessary to run GNOME and KDE environments on Mac OS X. Also, the XDarwin project is to switch from XFree86 to X.org.

PHP 5.0.1 is a maintenance release which adds many non-critical bugfixes and new Unix and Windows installation documentation which is auto-generated from the PHP Manual. Gambas 0.97 is now compiled with gcc 3.4. A new class, Settings, allows you to manage configuration files. The divide operator now behaves exactly as in other BASIC languages; it returns the whole floating point result, and not the integer part only. FOX 1.2.9 back-ports an FXTopWindow placement patch and fixes a bug in inquireDNDTypes(). FOX 1.3.8 (development) adds an FXSplashWindow class, an FXMemMap class for memory mapped files, and some missing APIs to FXFileSelector and FXFileDialog.

While FreeBSD -current is still moving toward more stable footing, many users have posted issues with panics and deadlocks in recent kernel builds. Bjoern A. Zeeb has kindly compiled a running list of lock order reversals, links to relevant threads, PRs, and existing patches. Lock order reversal messages are the result of FreeBSD's lock validation facility, witness(4), notifying the system of potential deadlocks as a means for developers to isolate bugs. Robert Watson explains in a Dec. 2003 thread.

Think Windows Firewall is tough enough to keep your system safe? Check FlexBeta's review. Elsewhere, the Express Install for WinXP SP2 is now available (90 MB).

Serenity Systems International is proud to announce the release of eComStation Version 1.2. Principal features include a new installation program jointly developed with IBM, enhancements to the desktop environment, additional Internet connection features, and improved device support.