Public-sector deployments of Linux are continuing to grow at the expense of Unix and Windows. The latest Linux win is the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), in Washington, which provides administrative support, program management and policy development services to U.S. federal courts.

The recently released QNX 6.3 is now available for a test run by developers. It doesn't seem to be a fully free for no commercial purposes no-IDE version of QNX RtP anymore.

GNOME Development Release 2.7.2 has been released for testing.

There already exists a good deal of reviews of Mandrake 10 already. Instead of doing the typical review, I'm going to do things a bit differently. You see, there are a few things my OS needs to do perfectly, to warrant it a chance to stay on my PC longer than an hour or so. If any one of these necesseties fail, I may end up not liking the OS altogether. My OS needs to support good hardware acceleration, it must be able to play MP3's, I absolutely need Zsnes, and it has to be fast and stable.

According to this SMP support is now in OpenBSD-current.

Apple is a famously secretive company. Its hush-hush culture makes it impossible for employees to talk about their work, even with spouses or family members. Today's the Day. This may help keep new products a surprise, but it has a downside: In the past few weeks widely publicized security holes in OS X were discussed everywhere and by everyone, except Apple, says Wired.

In the final part of this series of articles in response to Eric Raymond, an examination of whether a hybrid model is the way forward.

The Debian Project announced their AMD64 port is ready for inclusion in Sid. The port is currently at 97% compiled with most of the remaining packages having FTBFS RC bugs filed for unrelated reasons.

"We now have two distinct classes of Linux users whose interests are not the same, and perhaps we have more than that if we want to talk about people who think of software in political rather than pragmatic terms. Can these factions work together, or will tensions between them eventually kill the free software and open source movements?" Read the editorial at NewsForge.

Given the rapid growth of Linux in the technology industry, it might be easy to overlook other open source Unix variants. But recent numbers from research outfit Netcraft show that past is prologue. FreeBSD, that other Unix variant, has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year.

In GNUstep 0.9.3 spell checker has been reimplemented using libaspell. There is a new NSComboBox implementation. NSToolbar is much improved. There are binary incompatibilites from ivar additions in NSView and subclasses, a number of W32 window event enhancements, and art backend glyph drawing with alpha enhancements. On other toolkit news, the C++ Fox Toolkit 1.2.4 was released.

SkyFS has been updated to support the "Securtiy Context", and has now become a full multi-user filesystem. All files can be associated with such security contexts to permit various file operations (read, write, append, list, modify etc.) for all users specified in this security context only. In other news, system-wide controls have been polished up (screenshot available on website), and preliminary translation and support for the Chinese language has been implemented.

TuxS.org has posted a short review of the PCLinuxOS Live CD PR7.

The recently announced GNOME 2.6 has finally brought many features long awaited by the Linux desktop fans. GNOME 2.6 is all about ease of use, performance and unification and while it's unfortunately hard to say that the GNOME desktop feels fast, it certainly began to be really easy to use and it has consistent look and feel — and that consistency is what makes up for most of the quality of a graphical user environment. UPDATE: Scroll down the article to read some added commentary.