Purchasing decisions today are "based upon business metrics -- not how good the technology is," says Dan Kusnetzky of IDC. "If the business decision maker is unaware of a company or its products, the products won't be considered. If the products aren't considered, they certainly won't be selected." So, if Mandrakelinux is so user-friendly and powerful, why is it not a household word -- even compared to other Linux flavors? In a word: marketing. There is a widespread, if not universally shared, perception that Mandrakesoft's marketing efforts are far less sophisticated then its technical attributes.

Managers, mind your patches and VPNs! While none has yet been reported, exploits of the Kerberos vulnerabilities uncovered by MIT researchers could wreak havoc on a network.

Release Candidate 1 marks the start of the Hard Code Freeze, on the way towards the final GNOME 2.8 release in a couple of weeks.

The August edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available, nutshellising the OS' progress over the last month. Highlights include a website redesign, driver updates and VMware images. Additionally, LinuxBeta.com has assembled a superb slideshow running through Syllable's new desktop and apps.

Apple Computer Inc.'s Senior Vice President of Hardware Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, officially kicked off Apple Expo Paris this week introducing the iMac G5 during his keynote address. Analysts are unanimous in their support for the new consumer machine and the strategic ties Apple has drawn between the iMac and the iPod in marketing the computer. Read the interview here.

While Linux clusters can handle the demands of high performance computing, they're still lacking in some key features, said Eric Pitcher, vice president of technical marketing for Linux Networx, a cluster systems provider in Bluffdale, Utah. In part one of this interview, he championed Linux clusters, citing their productivity and scalability. In part two, he discusses pricing and points out Linux clusters' current shortcomings.

We are pleased to announce a new stable release of Valgrind, version 2.2.0.

This paper on how to tune FreeBSD to better withstand DoS attacks was at OnLamp a few months ago. It is now up on Silverwraith.com, along with several other FreeBSD tuning papers by the author.

MyXaml is proud to announce the release of version 1.0 of its declarative parser. MyXaml allows the programmer to write declarative programming instructions in XML to construct complex object graphs and property initialization for the .NET/ASP.NET framework and third party classes.

DistroWatch reports that a new development version of Mandrakelinux 10.1, PPC edition, is now available. Highlights: Linux kernel 2.6.8rc2; NPTL support; X11R6.7.0, GNOME 2.6, KDE 3.2.3, etc.

Microsoft updated it's Virtual PC website today with a flash demo and FAQs about VPC 7 for Mac. On the "How to Buy" page it says that the full package with XP Pro is available for purchase now. All of the other packages are available through pre-order (estimated to be released on October).

Sun Microsystems will begin compensating its sales staff for Solaris deals that involve hardware from other manufacturers, as part of the company's efforts to fend off competition from low-cost servers running Linux.

The second article of this two-part series explores more advanced lex/yacc development and introduces basic troubleshooting techniques. See e-mail headers parsed before your very eyes! Marvel at cryptic error messages! See a computer actually compute something!

Apple unveiled the new G5-based iMac, an all-in-one computer with 17/20" LCD screens. My Take: The product looks good visually, but I would have preferred if the bottom border of the screen wasn't as long compared to the other three, slicker, border sides (mockup). To customers, I would recommend the middle model: 17" LCD, 1.8 GHz G5, Superdrive, for $1499 US (just add Bluetooth). Good value.