Microsoft and Oracle announced on Thursday that they will take steps to provide greater integration between the popular database and the MS development suite. This will take place in the form of a free download later this year for Visual Studio .Net

Version 2 of CRUX, the lightweight keeping-it-simple Linux distribution, has been released ISO image. It's based on the 2.6 kernel, Glibc 2.33 with NPTL, GCC 3.3.3 and X.org's X11 6.7.0. Changelog.

Linuxlookup.com staff member Rich Hughes posted his thoughts on the latest Fedora release with this Core 2 Review (mirror due to Slashdotting and mirror2). "Fedora Core 2 is the newest release from The Distro Formerly Known As RedHat. Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates. Having played around with SuSE 9.1, Arch .6 and Slackware 9 with the 2.6 kernel, I was interested in seeing how the Fedora team did with this release."

Sun announced the availability of its new Operating System, branded Solaris on a range of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon-based systems. The Solaris OS will now run on a variety of servers, workstations, notebooks and "other products," which Sun is hoping will let it extend its reach, and find its way into the OS market.

Linux is evolving as the predominant operating system of the new millennium, and legacy operating systems such as OS/2 are being gradually phased out. This series of articles helps the developers involved in the tedious process of migrating/porting the OS/2 system drivers and applications to Linux. In this second of three installments, the authors focus on managing pipes, memory, and files.

It's hard to imagine that Linus Torvalds could have launched Linux without directly using earlier OS work, according to a report that has become controversial even before its scheduled publication Thursday.

LinuxDevices has a story by the leaders of the "Minimo" (Mini Mozilla) project, an effort to reduce Mozilla's code and runtime footprints and optimize its display for the small screens on embedded devices. The Minimo authors believe Minimo will become the browser of choice on embedded Linux devices with 64MB of RAM. Our sister site NMC featured an interview a few months ago (with shots).

Marcus Neervoort has made a MPEG video (136 MB) of last Saturday's Amiga OS4 event which includes demonstrations of Hollywood, Audio Evolution, Mame and Arteffect 4.0 Alpha on Amiga OS4. Many event pictures are available. Also Elena Novaretti and Massimo Tantignone recently ported Elena`s PowerIcons (32-bit PNG icons) project to AmigaOS4: Screenshot1 Screenshot2

Red Hat is the latest Linux company to challenge Mircosoft's hold on the business desktop space with the introduction of Red Hat Desktop, the latest addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family. Matthew Szulik, the company's chief executive, chairman and president met ITWeek to discuss Red Hat's latest efforts and share his views about the Linux landscape.

Red Hat's Seth Nickell is making his argument why including Mono on Gnome is an unacceptable legal risk down the road. Our Take: So much is being said that there is no written proof that MS won't sue over C# in the future, even if C# is an ECMA Standard. What I don't understand is why Red Hat's and Novell's laywers don't even try to extract that assurance from Microsoft in the first place and have a definite answer (and let us know too). This industry works via legal and contract co-ordination, it's time the Linux companies put that into work too: call a meeting and clear this up. It's that easy.

Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile in most cases, 'cause the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation, says KernelThread.

The Subversion development team has released version 1.0.3. This is a security bugfix release and the team suggests all Subversion users upgrade: "Subversion versions up to and including 1.0.2 have a buffer overflow in the date parsing code. Both client and server are vulnerable. The server is vulnerable over both httpd/DAV and svnserve (that is, over http://, https://, svn://, svn+ssh:// and other tunneled svn+*:// methods). Additionally, clients with shared working copies, or permissions that allow files in the administrative area of the working copy to be written by other users, are potentially exploitable."

Slew of browser updates lately: Mozilla 1.7RC2, Camino 0.8b, Opera 6.2 for Series 60, Dillo 0.8.1. I just tried Camino 0.8b on my dual 1.25GHz PowerMac G4 and its interface has seen a significant upgrade.

QNX was the first realtime operating system (RTOS) vendor to certify conformance to POSIX.1. Compared to the conformance claimed by other RTOS vendors based on earlier POSIX editions, the 2003 edition of the specification triples the scope of programming interfaces required for conformance. To become POSIX certified, the QNX Neutrino RTOS will be tested with more 1,300 POSIX interfaces. Full certification is expected to be achieved within six to twelve months.