Joe Barr writes: "Here is our promised in-depth look at the latest SUSE 9.1 beta. I found a little more flakiness than I would be comfortable with long-term, but I have been using this near-final version in my day-to-day work for nearly a week now and see no reason to go back to my previous installation."

Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly.

Apple Computer Inc. is seeking Common Criteria evaluation of Mac OS X, which could open government doors wider to open-source software. Apple wants a Common Criteria Evaluated Assurance Level 3, which "costs big bucks," said John Hurley, Apple’s security policy architect. "It's a pain in the neck to spend that money." Elsewhere, C|Net has two more Apple-related articles here and here.

Conectiva Linux, developed by Brazilian vendor Conectiva S.A., is the most popular distribution in South America, so it’s quite surprising that there aren’t more reviews of their products online. This is really quite surprising – while you may not have heard much about Conectiva Linux itself, you almost certainly know quite a lot about three of their most important contributions to the open source community – the Conectiva Crystal icon set, apt-rpm, and Synaptic.

For the first time, Apple sold more iPods in a quarter than it did Macs--and Apple CEO Steve Jobs is happy about it, MacMinute reports. "We feel great," Jobs told the New York Times. "We sold a lot of Macs, but we've sold more iPods in the quarter than all the Macs put together."

API/ABI-stable bindings for the GNOME 2.6 Development Platform, for C++, Java, and Perl are now released. That means you can seriously consider those programming languages (and others) when developing GNOME-based applications, and you can be confident that your applications will not break when future versions of these bindings are released. OSNews hopes that the Python and GTK# bindings will become part of this great set in the near future too.

Athene 3.4 is now available for download. The major new feature is backwards compatibility with X11 programs. This is achieved by running a rootless X11 server, the same technique employed by Mac OS X & QNX. The need for a separate window manager has also been eliminated by merging the window management functionality into the server itself. Screenshots demonstrating all this are here and here.

OrangeCrate presented an email interview with James Gosling of Sun Microsystems. Mr. Gosling answered some tough questions and refute some of the analysts’ propositions as to what exactly the Sun Microsystems and Microsoft settlement means for the future of Linux.

Microsoft gives its Java virtual machine technology a three-year reprieve in the wake of its antitrust settlement with Sun Microsystems. But don't expect any new MSJVM enhancements. On other Java news, NetBeans IDE 3.6, which includes two-tier J2EE 1.4 support, became generally available today. NetBeans is a pure Java, open source development environment for Windows, *nix and MacOSX.

A Swedish upstart is challenging Microsoft in the database arena by making use of the same low-end assault tactics that the software giant employed to gain a foothold. MySQL also released clustering software today.

Mandrake Linux 10.0 is now available to club members and in packaged sets. According to the press release, "Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official offers the most advanced Linux features currently available. 10.0 Official provides increased performance with Linux kernel 2.6, an enhanced desktop experience with KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4 and Mandrakegalaxy II, unbeatable hardware recognition, and support for Serial ATA, USB2 and IEEE 1394." The Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official FTP tree will be released this week, and public ISO images will be released later.

Linux kernel 2.4.26 was released today. You download it from kernel.org or from one of the mirrors.

I wanted to write something about the great progress being carried on linux as OS of choice for a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) since a long time. With the inclusion of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) into the 2.6 kernels, time has come to extend my experiences to all of you.

James Gosling of Java fame answers recent charges against Sun. Even more interesting, he has directly addressed Miguel de Icaza's assertion that Java is just as encumbered as .Net by pointing out that Sun has offered a patent grant to anyone who wishes to implement the Java specification. Update: Havoc Pennington of freedesktop.org/Red Hat/Gnome fame replies to Gosling.