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.

Head over to the SkyOS website to see the latest screen captures of the WindUI interface, as well as to sign up for your chance to win a copy of an upcoming internal beta release of SkyOS 5.0. All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire. In other news, a large bug in the SkyFS has been fixed, and a few new features such as customizable viewer backgrounds and a new "flag" option to call attention to important files have been added.

For years the development scene has been dominated by the C family of languages, primarily C itself and its immediate successor C++. Recent years have given rise to other C-descendents, however, such as Sun's Java and Microsoft's C#.

Competitors with fresh ideas are hot on the heels of the software behemoth, writes Faisal Islam.

Apple today introduced Xsan, a high-performance enterprise-class Storage Area Network (SAN) file system priced at US$999. Xsan is a 64-bit cluster file system for Mac OS X that enables organizations to consolidate storage resources and provide multiple computers with concurrent file-level read/write access to shared volumes over Fibre Channel. A beta version of Xsan is available immediately to qualified customers. The final version of Xsan is expected to be available this fall. On other news, Apple introduced Shake 3.5, Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio PRO 3 and a new application named Motion. Go to MacMinute.com for up to the minute updates on the new products unveiled as we write this.

Sun's recent cancellation of many UltraSparc chips is clear evidence that Sun is finding UltraSparc a huge resource drain. But, the company is still averse to porting Solaris over to Itanium (however they did port it to AMD's 64bit architectures). This article is an analysis of the rationale behind such bizarre moves, according to the author, and Sun's alternatives to this self-destructive strategy.

Underscoring Novell's commitment to the Linux operating system, the company's chief financial officer on Friday hinted at further acquisitions. Joseph Tibbetts, pointing to Novell's purchase late last year of two leading Linux companies -- Boston's Ximian and Germany's SuSE -- said the networking giant is on its way to becoming the world's leading Linux solutions provider. Elsewhere, alternative to Windows should play to its own strengths, says Novell Linux guru.

Mac OS X has been able to do COM for quite some time. The thing is, no one has really broadcast this -- until now. You can write COM components that have the potential to run on both Windows and Mac OS X with no code changes. This is another reason for Mac OS X to be considered as a serious platform for enterprise applications.

Hyperion Entertainment and the Amiga OS 4.0 development team announced that after nearly 30 months of painstaking development the Amiga OS 4.0 Developer Pre-release has gone gold and will be sent to the duplication plant on Monday, April 19, 2004.

"On balance, it's hard to see how this isn't a runaway success for Sun. After all, they got everything they wanted, plus $1,950,000,000 in found money. But somehow most of the press managed to see it as McNealy surrendering to Microsoft. Rationally, I don't see how anyone could read even just the press release and believe this." Read the editorial at the LinuxInsider.

O'Reilly's latest entry in the "Pocket" series, "Linux Pocket Guide", bills itself as a "quick reference for experienced users and a guided tour for beginners".