Sun Microsystems has been marketing Solaris, one of the main Unix derivatives, for about twenty years. So why, then, would they market a Linux distribution? Let's take a look at what it is they're offering and what it's uses are to shed some light on the "why". Read the rest of the review at PCBurn.

In yesterday's annual strategy memo to Microsoft employees, CEO Steve Ballmer declared: "Noncommercial software products in general, and Linux in particular, present a competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they require our concentrated focus and attention."

Here is an article asking Red Hat to opensource the GFS cluster file system. Elsewhere, Red Hat's newest version of Linux has been granted a significant security certification, bringing the company a step closer to competitors. Version 3 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been certified to meet Evaluation Assurance Level 2 (EAL2) of the Common Criteria certification.

Linuxbeginner.org spent a week with Linspire 4.5 and they have written down their experiences.

Miguel de Icaza talks to Glyn Moody about Mono's progress, how Ximian was bought by Novell, and why he is so scared of Microsoft's Longhorn. Read the interesting interview here.

Jono Bacon is editorializing on his blog regarding usability on FOSS applications. UPDATE: Acts of Volition looks at how "creeping featuritis" has affected interface design in different open source software projects. The article notes that while some projects have succumbed to the problem, others have managed to tame the beast.

This whitepaper provides an overview of the architecture, benefits, and features of the Platform Innovation Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface, a modular, platform-independent architecture for implementating boot and other BIOS functions recently. The Framework, developed by Intel, is driver-based, enabling binary-linking of modules; and it is C-based, clean, scalable, and modular, allowing it to support diverse CPU architecures - such as Intel's IA-32, Itanium & XScale - within a single source tree.

Even at the enterprise server level, there are wide differences between Linux distributions, not only in price, but in ease of installation, included features and software, and particularly in ease of administration. See how the two most popular Linux enterprise server distributions match up.

This critical update for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 enhances the stability and performance of Media Center Edition 2004 and resolves these issues.

Apple Computer on Wednesday celebrated the first birthday of its iTunes Music Store by unveiling more than a half-dozen new features for the popular online music service. More info on MacMinute.

While most people bicker about which OS is best, the truth is much vaguer: what computer is sitting on your desk has more to do with your comfort level than intellectual choice.

Trolltech today announced the release of Qt, version 3.3.2. Qt, Trolltech's C++ multiplatform application framework. List of changes here.

The Gentoo Linux Release Engineering team is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.1. Read more on DistroWatch or the press release.

According to WinBeta, Windows XP Service Pack 2 has just been pushed back a bit further than originally expected. These delays will effect both the second Release Candidate along with the Release to Manufacturing/Release to Web. The following are the new expected delivery dates: RC2: May 26th, 2004 (previous date was May 12th) and RTM: July 21st, 2004 (previous date was June 23rd). However, MSFN has different dates to report.