eWEEK Labs reviews the latest version of The GNOME Project's desktop environment for Linux and Unix and finds a faster and more polished release that further brightens the prospect of Linux as a viable corporate desktop replacement.

The future of CVS, Subversion 1.0.2, is now available in the source releases area.

N|vu is a web development application with a WYSIWYG interface that is aimed to be user friendly, easy and powerful, sponsored by Linspire. This review looks at this program in detail and aims to help users to get an idea about it.

ReactOS 0.2.2 RC-1 is out. Many screenshots of the CVS version are available here.

This article explores a solution for globalization applications in Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME). It describes this solution throughout the software development life cycle, including requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. You'll learn why globalization is important in J2ME applications, the guidelines for developing a globalization application, and how to implement these guidelines throughout the development cycle.

Visual Dataflex is a programming language of sorts which may be best described as belonging in the category of Visual Basic for Applications, the older style of Visual Basic and maybe even a very little bit of .Net. It's simple and good in what it does. Simple? Why! I hear you cry. Fear not, I will explain why I think this. First though, I'd like to touch on what it can do for you?

With his management team reshuffled, Sun's president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz sat down again with eWEEK's Steve Gillmor to discuss Sun's contributions to the open-source community, the Sun-MS deal's impact on DRM, identity management and visual development tools, and the strategic role of Sun's auto-update technology in the emerging real-time enterprise platform.

This show is all about architecture from Why to How. Keith and Harry bring the developer's and architect's perspective to the discussion, respectively. The discussion starts with the importance of good design and architecture, to techniques, tools, standards, and the like.

Longhorn's arrival will indeed be monumental, as their research teams are finally producing something worthwhile. The OSS world has much to do in preparation for this release; this version of Microsoft's OS will not simply offer trivial UI "enhancements" that appeal to users, as it has done in the past - they are really targeting both users and developers very forcefully this time around.

Apple says it is incorporating speech technology into new versions of its OS X operating system which will make Macs more accessible to users who are visually impaired as well as people with learning difficulties. Additionally, Apple released today updated Powerbooks and iBooks. BBC has an article about the G5-based laptops in the future.

SUSE's chief technology officer said he believes the practice of "backporting" features from the 2.6 Linux kernel into older versions is a "bad thing" because it interferes with standardization of the open source operating system. During a keynote address at the Real World Linux Conference here Thursday, Juergen Geck also chided industry players to avoid practices that could further fragment open source standardization efforts.

Sun Microsystems launched a handful of initiatives Monday designed to promote its talent to run Solaris on x86 systems. The company is trying to build on its install base of Solaris deployments, which are popular in the telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and government sectors, but have experienced increased competition from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and enterprise Linux offerings from Red Hat or SUSE.

Metin Amiroff was the first of many readers to let us know that KDE 3.2.2 is now available. According to the press release, "The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.2.2, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes." Downloads can be found here.

A data model provides application developers a much better understanding of the overall application architecture, even though generally speaking they are not required to know in-depth about database architecture details. A database designer can use a tool like Rational XDE to model and visualize the database, ensure database rules, add different database objects, and play around with relationships. The article shows you the basics of how to model a DB2 db using Rational XDE Developer for Java.