Vector Linux has always interested me because of its purpose and origin: a simplified distribution from a Slackware base. Last month Vector's developers announced the first release candidate for Vector Linux 4.0 SOHO edition and here is the review.

Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online.

The new Linux 2.6 kernel offers many improvements over the 2.4 version. One area of technical advancement is in the kernel networking options. Although there are enhancements in most of the files associated with the networking options, this article focuses on major feature improvements and additions that affect entire sections rather than on specific files.

CinePaint is taking a new direction to migrate away from GTK+ to FLTK and this has lit up a new discussion about GTK+ 2.x's speed problems on both Windows and Unix. The CinePaint project cited other reasons as well, like the non-elegance of the API, the bloated source that makes it difficult to debug it and thread-safe reasons.

What is a distribution and how does it differ from the distribution next door? Do they provide a different-enough experience to the user who is in search of a capable desktop?

Terra Soft Solutions completed the first Yellow Dog Linux developers summit, resulting in a two-year Yellow Dog Linux roadmap for PowerPC. With the next release of Yellow Dog Linux Terra Soft will offer 32-bit and 64-bit products built upon Red Hat's RPM-based Fedora.

Sun announced the sixth update to the Solaris 9 OE for SPARC & x86 systems, and the availability of next generation Solaris 10 through the Software Express program.

X.Org Foundation today announced their first release of the X Window System since the formation of the Foundation in January of this year. The new X.Org release, called X Window System Version 11 Release 6.7 (X11R6.7), builds on the work of the X.Org X11R6.6 and XFree86 Project Inc.

"Windows Update Services is an example of how Microsoft is making good on its promise to continue to improve security and increase automation around the patching and updating experience," Microsoft's Steve Anderson told TechNewsWorld.

A "Software Update"-alike software, called Renew, automatically fetches information on new versions for third party software you have installed on your Mac.

In a wide-ranging interview, Ballmer talked about the state of the tech industry, the company's right to continue adding features to Windows and Microsoft's transition from adolescence into adulthood.

Speakers and attendees at the open source events of Portland's InnoTech Conference last week concurred that Linux was at home in the enterprise, handling heavier database demands and other workloads and proving itself on a number of platforms.

SourceXtreme, Inc has posted the first in a series of articles on development with KJSEmbed. KJSEmbed is the KDE JavaScript engine with bindings for Qt/KDE.

Ryan McBride works full time on OpenBSD development. His first contribution was adding IPv6 support to PF, OpenBSD's stateful packet filter.