"Debian is not easy enough to use to give to everyone... we are working on making it more usable, but it will still take us a while to get there", states Martin Michlmayr, The Debian Project Leader in an exclusive interview for PCTechTalk.com.

Novell's acquisition of open-source start-up Ximian almost a year ago marked a turning point for the networking giant. Losing out to Microsoft in the struggle for domination of the network operating-system market precipitated a downward slide that saw the company pushed to the peripheries of directory and security software. Read the interview at ZDNet.

Microsoft Corp. says it is looking to turn over more of its programs to open-source software developers, playing a greater role in a process that the Redmond company has criticized strongly at times in the past. Money-makers like the company's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite aren't on the table -- or anywhere near it.

Sun Microsystems will launch its newest Java development tool at the JavaOne conference next week and lay out plans for improvements to the Java language.

"I've had SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional running for about a month now, its a good step forward from version 9. As usual its fixed lots of annoyances but created more." Read More at ImAFish.co.uk.

The guys over at Griffin Technology were very kind to send us over two of their products for evaluation: the SightLight and the iFire. Here's what we think about these two Mac products.

This article demonstrates how Avalon's simple 3-D support enables you to create 3-D scenes. Discusses the ViewPort3D element and the use of point of view, camera, and lights in XAML markup.

Camino is a web browser optimized for Mac OS X with a Cocoa user interface, and powerful Gecko layout engine. Version 0.8 was released today. Elsewhere, the developers of Mozilla Sunbird, the standalone version of Mozilla Calendar, are looking for a new default theme and are asking the community to build a new one.

I've been using Fedora Core 1 (FC1) for a few months now and have been quite happy with it. It is a good distribution with a minimal number of bugs (if any) that have caused me problems. Of course, it took some tweaking to get it just right, but I can accept that for the price.

It's been already a week after GnomeFiles.org went live (my, time flies when you work on something night and day) and we have the first statistics in: so far, there are more than 150 applications submitted, more than 3,800 downloads and about 250,000 web pages served. That last number is actually better than I expected, as it seems that Gnomefiles.org is already able to do 15,000 page views per day the last few days without any major linkage from other sites (it went up to 60,000 for the day when Slashdot linked on Sunday). The prizes will be handed out soon to the winning developers so if you haven't submitted your app yet, do it before the end of the week to become eligible.

The name may read iDVD but you hear I, DVD. I, Movie. I, Photo. The "I" denotes something special, something important, something you should take notice in. The impact is most effective when the product name makes the "i" personal, as in I, Chat for the product iChat. Read the analysis at MacNewsWorld.

Given the nature of open source software, many Linux applications are distributed in a "tarball" containing source code that you must build before you can run the application. Larger applications can take several hours to build. This article shows how you can use the distributed C compiler, distcc, to speed up the compilation of these sources so you can start using them sooner.

While UnixReview reviews Xandros 2, Xandros announced the release of OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) editions of the Xandros Desktop Operating System. These OEM editions allow the manufacturer to customize desktop wallpaper and icons, browser home page and bookmarks, and other aspects of thecustomer experience to meet their specific business objectives and regional needs. Read more for the rest of the press release.

This paper provides preliminary information about the Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It describes limitations of the current driver models that have led to the development of WDF, explains how WDF solves these problems, and introduces the fundamental components of WDF.