Distributors must solve setup and licensing issues for Linux to be a success on the desktop. For Linux to become a real competitor to Windows on the desktop, Linux distributors must refine their software installation and management systems. There are some loose ends that need to be tied up and some tricky legal knots to unravel, says eWeek.

Microsoft Corp. is driving toward its goal of shipping the next client and server versions of Windows in tandem. But the effort will come at the expense of a few wish-list server features, according to high-ranking company officials.

MandrakeSoft S.A. and Novell Inc.'s SuSE Linux division, recently shipped new versions of their respective mainstream Linux distributions, both based on the new Linux 2.6 kernel. eWEEK Labs tested Mandrakelinux 10 PowerPack+ and SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional—which each began shipping last month—and we were impressed with their ease of use and with the broadness of their capabilities.

This is the first official release of PearPC, 0.1, and there are still unimplemented instructions, mysterious bugs and missing features. The application allows you to run PowerPC OSes under emulation on a x86 machine.

This article shows how to grid enable applications using the first two of the six strategies so the applications can run as single or multiple instance batch jobs that are location independent. It explains the characteristics of applications using these strategies and details what the application developer must, should, and can optionally do to implement these strategies. A major objective when using Strategy 1 and Strategy 2 is to ensure that the application is as flexible as possible regarding middleware products.

Last Thursday OSNews had the opportunity to meet Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, Ximian and among other things leader of the much discussed, Mono project. Miguel is a talented and versatile developer but he is also a very intelligent businessman able to understand the industry on many different levels. Talking to Miguel guarantees that you are very quickly taken away by his enthusiasm and optimism and his thoughtful strategies and vision on how OSS will take over the world.

Microsoft plans to announce on Monday that its Media Center OS is moving into new countries, even as the software maker works to make the entertainment software more ready for prime time.

Microsoft is giving away copies of Visual Basic.NET in a promotion called VB at the movies. In exchange for watching five relatively short "movies" you get a "free" (not for resale) copy of Visual Basic.NET (IDE and all needed tools). The movies themselves are a showcase of features available in Visual Basic.NET. Note that only 2 of 7 movies are currently available.

After five years in development, the time is right for the company's Linux (corporate) desktop software to take on Microsoft, its boss tells Stephen Pritchard of Independent.co.uk.

According to Computer Times, Microsoft will allow SP2 to be installed on any copy of Windows XP including copies with invalid license keys. Microsoft decided "that even if someone has pirated copy of Windows, it is more important to keep him safe than it is to be concerned about the revenue issue." There is no news of whether or not pirated copies will be allowed access to the Windows Update site afterwards or just allowed to install SP2.

MacNewsWorld presents a rumble in the Silicon Jungle -- May 7th through May 14th -- a six-round Mac Death Match in which Mac Observer editor-in-chief Bryan Chaffin and the always-controversial industry analyst Rob Enderle square off on today's key Mac issues.

"This build did feel more solid overall and was a lot of fun to play with. But users will be looking for value beyond fun factor. If Microsoft can address some of the performance issues we've seen, then we'll feel much more bullish about Longhorn" writes ExtremeTech in their preview of Longhron.

OpenBSD celebrated release 3.5 on 1 May 2004. In honor of this release, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers of OpenBSD's PF, a powerful and flexible packet filtering interface. This is the second half of an interview. Elsewhere, the DaemonNews Ezine was released with new articles.

Componentized Linux by Progeny is a new kind of Linux distribution, built as a set of interchangeable parts. The core component is an LSB 1.3 certified Linux runtime. LinuxCompatible takes a look at an earlier developer snapshot of Progeny Debian 2.0, the first Linux distro based on Componentized Linux.