FreeBSD core team member Scott Long posted the latest bi-monthly status report, covering FreeBSD development for May and June of 2004. Scott begins: "May and June were yet again busy months; the Netperf project passed major milestones and can now be run with the debug.mpsafenet tunable turned on from sources in CVS. The ARM, MIPS, and PPC ports saw quite a bit of progress, as did several other SMPng and Netgraph projects. FreeBSD 5.3 is just around the corner, so don't hesitate to grab a snapshot and test the progress!" Read the rest over at KernelTrap.

Open source appears challenged by patents but that fear is often exaggerated. Lawrence Rosen, technology attorney and author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law" (Prentice Hall, 2004), offers a calming view of the patent situation. He describes reasonable steps we can take to prevent patents from interfering with software freedom.

Novell is developing a slimmed-down version of SuSE Linux especially designed to desktop enterprise deployments easier to support. SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional, the latest version of the desktop OS, comes with 3,000 packages and seven web browsers, according to Novell. Steve Brown, Novell’s European VP, said there was a danger of the OS becoming too "top heavy".

Service Pack 4 (SP4) allows existing eVC4 users to target Windows CE 5.0 based devices. In addition to supporting the new Windows CE 5.0 platform, SP4 is cumulative in nature and includes support for Windows CE 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 based platforms as well. This download must be installed on top of existing eVC4 installations (the full eMbedded VC++ 4.x is free to download).

This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. The first 2 parts covered the Hardware and core OS. In this third part we look at security, the file system, file management and throw in a couple of other random ideas for good measure.

This download provides the DirectX 9.0c end-user package that devs can include with their product.

Microsoft began a wide beta testing program of its forthcoming SQL Server 2005 database on Monday, a much anticipated--and delayed--product central to the company's server software line.

When I was first asked to review this book, I was somewhat taken aback by the title. I wondered if it could be construed as blasphemous. The dictionary came to my rescue with this definition: damn, adj., beyond doubt or question.

Today marks the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.2 for the AMD64, HPPA, SPARC and X86 architectures.

Are you in for some coding this summer? yellowTAB has today started their first development contest. The price for the first one to develop a fully working ICH AC97 driver, is 300 euros and a free copy of Zeta from yellowTAB. yellowTAB is a small company with few resources, so this contest is a promising call out to the dev community.

Randi Rost gives an example of the coding needed for shading in OpenGL, including the code for the vertex shader, the fragment shader, and the application code used to initialize these shaders.

MadPenguin has just published a review with screenshots of TurboLinux 10F.

The Ottawa Linux Symposium wrapped up its busy 4 days with a 6-hour long bar party at the Black Thorn Café across the street from the American Embassy in Ottawa. And for some, it was that social aspect that they came for. For most attendees, though, stable Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton's keynote address was the highlight of the day.

With the assistance of a few free utility programs, routine maintenance under OS X is very easy. The very same procedures and utilities that are used for routine maintenance under OS X are what Randy B. Singer recommends for generic troubleshooting.