"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.

In a historic announcement, issued jointly this evening by RISCOS Ltd., Castle, Advantage 6, MicroDigital and VirtualAcorn, it would very much appear that the past on-going disputes surrounding RISC OS have been settled. Take a deep breath, then wait for this.

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.

After three years and much controversy, Miguel de Icaza's Mono project has finally released its 1.0 version. NewsForge recently talked with Erik Dasque, the senior project leader for Mono, about the release of 1.0, the controversy and criticisms encountered along the way, and the plans for the future.

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

"It's alive!" was the cry issued this week by the Solaris grunts at Sun Microsystems. For the first time, the engineers managed to get a true 64-bit kernel up and running on an Opteron box. This is a key milestone in Sun's ambitious plan to make Solaris a preferred operating system in the x86 world.

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.

The company on Thursday issued a statement saying, "Sun is considering open sourcing Java Enterprise System, but no final decision has been made." A Sun representative attributed the statement to Stephen Borcich, executive director of Sun's Java Enterprise System, and offered no other details.

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.

Due to an installer/fdisk bug there is an update available. Current Dragonfly version is 1.0A.

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.

The first release candidate of Subversion 1.1.0 is ready and available. From the release notes: Subversion 1.1 can best be summarized as: (1) a new non-database repository back-end, and (2) a whole slew of client-side improvements.

Continuing the earlier discussion about low latency and Ingo Molnar's voluntary kernel preemption patch, the conversation moved onto the affect a filesystem can have on latency. Specifically, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton noted that ReiserFS was known to have some latency issues in both 2.4 & 2.6 kernels.

Sun claims for Java performance Vs .NET and the MS counter-claim.