Syllable gets a beta of a brand new installer and an ISO is up for testing. Update: A VMWare driver too.

Dare Obasanjo looks at the available options for representing XML-based data that is shared between components within a single process/AppDomain and discusses the design tradeoffs of each approach.

Slashdot reports that Sun CEO Scott McNealy has finally answered the long awaited question that has been on the minds of open source and Java developers and the answer is "no". He stated today that Sun sees no solution solved from open sourcing Java that isn't already addressed.

Last week I reviewed Win4Lin, a solution that makes it possible to run certain versions of Microsoft Windows on Linux. This week CrossOver Office is the next tool I am going to have a look at. Again my main focus will be programs I need to run myself.

Novell, which sells Linux for servers and desktop computers, is considering a move into the market for embedded computing for devices such as cell phones and vending machines. Elsewhere, IBM has made a promised $50 million investment in new Linux power Novell, tightening the companies' technology partnership. Similarly, HP is expanding its own Novell relationship with a push into desktop PCs.

In a decision that could affect consumers, competitors and PC makers, the European Commission requires Microsoft to unbundle Media Player from Windows and pay a $613 million fine.

From the PR: :"Microsoft Corp. today took another step forward in its strategy to make the business value of speech technology more broadly available to mainstream enterprise companies as Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates launched Microsoft Speech Server 2004 at the co-located AVIOS~SpeechTEK Spring 2004, Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference (DevCon) 2004 and Fawcette Technical Publications' VSLive! San Francisco 2004 events." Elsewhere, Microsoft has announced XNATM, a powerful next-generation software development platform. XNA empowers developers to deliver breakthrough games while combating rising production costs and ever-increasing hardware complexity.

All-in-One package of software and diagnostic tools helps enterprises evaluate and implement a migration strategy to LindowsOS.

This document aims to combine the experience of many of the top KDE developers about Qt and KDE frameworks dos and dont's and provide a good source of advice to new KDE programmers.

A recent patch submission from Bosko Milekic features on-demand memory allocation for mbufs and flexible sysctl tuning options - no more fiddling with NMBCLUSTERS and recompiling. The code does not appear to be committed yet and could probably stand some testing by the willing user population.

The Mac maker suffers a snub at the hands of software powerhouse Adobe Systems, manages to shuttle its Xserve G5 server out the door after a month's delay, and gets a tip on the iPod and iTunes from RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, while Wal-Mart now offers cheaper song downloads at .88 cents.

Novell's Linux-oriented divisions, Ximian and SuSE, will work together to make one common Novell Linux desktop from Gnome's and KDE's best features, Novell Inc. CEO Jack Messman revealed in an eWEEK.com interview at the company's annual BrainShare trade show here. Ximian has been the main power behind Gnome, while SUSE has been KDE's chief backer.

During the 2.5 development cycle, ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture was merged into the Linux kernel. At that time, support for OSS, the Open Sound System was marked as deprecated. A recent thread on the lkml discussed the future of OSS, questioning if it is worth fixing issues with now deprecated OSS drivers. Read the full discussion at KernelTrap.

Computer graphics have long been dominated by bitmapped images. However, the free software community has taken an innovative lead by adopting scalable graphic formats on its desktops. Inthis article I cover the history and rise of scalable graphics on the desktop from my angle - as a proponent of its use in the GNOME platform. This article mostly focuses on SVG's progress from a GNOME point of view, both because GNOME has progressed the furthest and because I am most knowledgable with GNOME's efforts. I will however mention major landmarks in other projects where appropriate.