Where exactly is Java technology going? It all depends on which aspect of Java one chooses. No doubt, this open platform presents many opportunities—and a few roadblocks—to IT innovators and customers. Elsewhere, this blog entry discusses the problems that SUN is facing how they should be addressed.

OpenDarwin 7.2.1 (which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.3.2) has been released for both PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures: complete release notes are available here.

Michael Chute on OS X, Research "In the end, ease of use and data security was the rule," Michael Chute told MacNewsWorld. "I spoke with people using Linux clusters, and while they were effective, they entailed more significant IT resources. No need for a bunch of scientists mucking around when they do not have the time to learn system administration."

"I hope that Part I of the Stealth Desktop series was a good start for our series about using Slackware as a desktop. In Part II we will focus on the hardest part: making sound and video work. Sound is not especially difficult; but video is. Fortunately, after this step, it is an easy ride." Read Eduardo's guide through these tasks at OfB.biz.

This is a step-by-step guide to installing FreeBSD 5. It assumes moderate experience with linux and leaves you with a fully updated FreeBSD system.

VMWare makes it very easy to run Linux right on your Windows desktop (and the other way around). And, if you're feeling adventurous, you can even try running the beta versions of the next version of Windows called "Longhorn" or even Sun's Solaris operating system. Read the review at ExtremeTech.

"In this continuing series of Longhorn articles, I will talk about the APIs that developers will use to write the next generation of Windows applications. In this article I will focus on WinFX and discuss briefly the rest of the technologies. I will give you a high-level introduction to WinFX and what it means to developers." Read the article by Wei-Meng Lee at WindowsDevCenter.

Two articles at OnJava, first an article titled "Better, Faster, Lighter Programming in .NET and Java" and also "Avoiding J2EE cluster bugs".

This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. In the first part I described a system with a multi-core multi-threaded CPU, FPGA and Cell processors. In this second part we start looking at the Operating System.

ArsTechnica brings you an introduction to Mono. For starters, they will dish up a basic introduction to Mono, MonoDevelop, and C#, and then branch out to GTK#, database access, ASP.NET, advanced C# topics, and conclude with a discussion of the future of Mono, and the C# standard. Not a Linux guy? Don't worry, all examples will work on Windows and Linux, with OSX support coming shortly.

To de Icaza, replicating Microsoft's hard work--much of which has been published to standards body Ecma International--will make other operating systems, notably Linux, more attractive to developers. And with the "universal virtual machine" of .Net, programmers can have a greater choice in languages. In his office decorated with small stuffed monkeys ("mono" means monkey in Spanish), de Icaza spoke to CNET News.com shortly before the company began shipping Mono version 1.0.

The latest release of Solaris Express is available for download. Tonnes of new features again, as listed on blogs.sun.com by the three A's, Alan, Alan and Adam.

.Net is fast becoming the developer's platform of choice --in spite of Microsoft's poor promotional job.

My first experience with Slackware Linux came with version 9.1, after 4 years of using various versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux. I disliked the general direction these distributions were moving in and didn't see their increasing focus on the "big end of town" as auguring well for either myself or clients of my small one-person IT consultancy business. I quickly became a Slackware convert and have since used it exclusively for all my server deployments. Check in for more and 15 screenshots from Slackware 10.