Has is really been a year? How the time flew by... In July 2003 I took a gamble that's paid off like I never imagined it would. In early 2003, I came across Lycoris and Desktop/LX.

Yesterday, on pearpc.net, it was anounced that PearPC has experimental altivec support. Among other things Altivec theoretically improves OS and application speed due to the ability to handle floating point math operations. The builds can be downloaded here.

The revised Agreement continues to honour the original purposes of the Foundation. In particular, should Trolltech ever discontinue making regular releases of the Qt Free Edition for any reason - including a buyout or merger of Trolltech or the liquidation of Trolltech - the Qt Free Edition will be released under the BSD license and optionally under one or more other Open Source Licenses.

The smell of newly purchased stuff... So, there I was, Hauppauge WinTV board in hand, Mandrake 10 installed and ready to rock! Little did I expect that it would come to this. But first things first.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Builder AU recently caught up with RMS about his achievements, the Free Software movement and his concerns with the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement. He will be in Australia on October 5 to speak at the Builder Conference in Sydney.

Gartner will officially announce figures that show Linux has shipped on 5% of all PCs worldwide in 2004. It expects that figure to grow to 7.5% by 2008, but is quick to point out that this is not necessarily a representative figure of the number of Linux PCs being used. The company estimates that perhaps 2% of all PCs shipped worldwide this year will actually be used with Linux, with that figure growing to 3.5% by 2008. Not every PC that ships with a version of Linux continues to run with that, noted Gartner.

IceWM is a lightweight window manager for UNIX-like systems. Although widely used, it is often underrated - there is hardly any IceWM-related content on the Internet. This article is my attempt to share my experiences as a longtime IceWM user. It contains tips and tricks, usage scenarios, and makes use of examples whenever possible to better demonstrate IceWM's features and capabilities. Finally, the article is meant for those with some familiarity with UNIX, but who are new to IceWM.

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 2. The focus of this release, code-named Kollege, is to fix bugs in the run-up to aKademy in late August. More here and here.

In its first preview at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference last year, Windows XP successor Longhorn was shown running a 20-year-old copy of Visicalc. Ancient DOS software won't be the lone occupant of the Longhorn compatibility box. Win32, the Web, and even WinForms -- the .Net era's first GUI framework -- are all legacy APIs from Longhorn's perspective. Their replacements, Microsoft says, will jointly deliver "the best of Windows and the best of the Web."

Linux can learn valuable lessons from its elder cousins in the enterprise, the proprietary Unixes from the likes of IBM, Sun, and HP. Those operating systems, in turn, can learn some lessons from Linux. Comparing the features of the more enterprise-ready Linux distros with AIX, one of the leading proprietary Unixes, helps identify some.

This article is the 2nd in a 2-part series of articles on getting up and running with GCJ on Mac OS X 10.3.4 ("Panther"). The first article addressed getting a recent GCJ release built and installed on OS X (with no Swing/AWT support), along with some rationale on why you'd want to do such a thing. This article deals with building and installing a Swing/AWT-enabled GCC straight from cvs.

Several new security-promoting technologies are to be built into Longhorn. These include an ability to periodically check user's systems against new security fixes in a centralized patch database, and to institute far more stringent access controls and permission levels. Read the article here.

"Learning Python, Second Edition" was published only a few months ago by O'Reilly. We take a quick look at this promising book.

Since the release of PHP5 a lot of interest has reverberated down through the whole PHP community. In particular, there's a call for a PHP-GTK 2.0 which will utilize GTK2 and will have an entire rewrite of it from the ground up to make use of new features.