This is a reminder for our 'Xandros Business Desktop 2.0 competition'. We only had 8 entries so far, so there is a huge chance that you will be able to win this prize (valued at $129 USD). The competition ends on Wednesday night (PST time), so if you would like to get so close on winning an online competition as never before, read here on how to enter the competition.

After years of railing against open source, Microsoft Corp is preparing to shift its stance by releasing code to the open source community. A member of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative has told ComputerWire open source code is "coming". Stephen Walli, platform's business development manager, added Microsoft would likely release "non core" code.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told attendees of the Gartner IT Expo on Monday that Microsoft will release an alpha test release of Longhorn later this year.

OpenBSD developer Ryan McBride explains the new firewall redundancy features in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.5 release in his article Firewall Failover with pfsync and CARP.

The Solaris Operating System includes many file systems, and more are available as add-ons. Deciding which file system to apply to a particular application can be puzzling without insight into the design criteria and engineering tradeoffs that go into each product.

"To the surprise of few, Apple's Hypercard passed away quietly this week, after life support was finally withdrawn by the company. It had a run of over 16 years - though the last were in circumstances of at best benign neglect. Not a bad duration for a software product, but it still hurts to see it go, since I had some part in its gestation." Read the interesting atricle at PacificAVC.

"Sandwiched between these two significant business events, MandrakeSoft released Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community, an early-adopter's release of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official, due out in May. Even though it's only a public beta, the newest Mandrakelinux is definitely worth the download, some rough edges notwithstanding." Read Kurt Wall's Mandrake Linux 10.0 CE review at LinuxPlanet.

Devicelogics, a company founded by former executives of Caldera and Lineo in Utah, says it has begun shipping version 8.0 of DR-DOS today. The company says the most significant enhancement in the latest version of this long-lived operating system is support for FAT32 large partitions, enabling DR-DOS "to keep up with market demand for DOS-based embedded solutions built on FAT32 platforms."

This article explains how WinFS defines types of objects that can be stored and examines the WinFS API. Using WinFS to store data in a cohesive data store, not just a file system, systems and users can store rich metadata about a myriad of objects.

Have you ever been using an Open Source application and noticed something horribly wrong? I have and as a skilled maintenance programmer it really tickles my fix-it bone. I know I could fix it if I wanted to but it's just so much effort. Usually it's only when a bug really annoys the hell out of me that I'll even go to the trouble of downloading the source code (or even finding out where I can download the source code from). In the rare moments that I have taken on the feat of fixing someone else's code I've found myself exercising my most mad maintenance programmer skills and I decided to make a little list.

"My team and other teams within Novell continue to develop and use Gtk as their toolkit (recently open sourced Simias/iFolder for instance) and all of the Mono GUI development tools. The only use of Qt that am aware of today is SUSE's recently open sourced YAST" said Ximian's Miguel de Icaza replying on Heise's recent article on standardization of Novell on Qt.

Apple is now officially endorsing OpenAL and has provided a new branch of Mac OS X code which is now in OpenAL's CVS (it requires to install Apple's latest CoreAudio SDK before compiling).

The Independent Qt Tutorial has been updated with a new chapter on the Qt canvas module. It consists of examples and in-depth discussions. The Independent Qt Tutorial is a book introducing the different areas of Qt step-by-step with task orientated chapters rich on examples and a detailed discussion of the different areas of the Qt toolkit.

Tudy Parghel sent us a link to the first part of Tom's Hardware's migration guide. It starts you down the path of migrating from Windows to Linux.