On Saturday March 20, I spent my lazy Saturday morning browsing the web for Linux news. I surfed over to DistroWatch.com & read the latest happenings in regards to Linux distributions. I read a news blurb on latest release of dyne:bolic 1.2. dyne:bolic is self described as a free multimedia studio in a GNU/Linux live CD. I was intrigued by the prospect of playing with a multimedia studio on live CD that won't interfere with my PC's current setup. I downloaded the ISO via Azureus Java bittorrent client. I burned it to CDR using K3B and booted my DAW off the dyne:bolic CD.

The forthcoming Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is actually a significant upgrade for Microsoft's OS, delivering much-needed security enhancements. ZDNet.co.uk highlights the key changes.

Mandrake 10 has it, SUSE's rolling it out in 9.1, Gentoo has had a "test" version with it since last year, and now we'll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure . This is not in line with the basic "it's ready when it's ready" dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors, says NewsForge.

Testimony during the second week of trial in the consumer class-action lawsuit in Minnesota has revealed (free reg. req.) some embarrassing internal documents from Microsoft which were not disclosed in the bitter 1997 federal antitrust lawsuit that focused on the company's attempt to control the browser markets in the 1990's.

Qt# is back: a new build system has been hacked into place to avoid dependency on Portable.NET's csant. Miscellaneous bugfixes have also been made to this version.

Has it been three years already? A quick glance at the calendar tells us that the date is March 24, 2004, three years to the day after Mac OS X 10.0 began shipping. Join Mac.Ars in a trip down memory lane as they look at three years of Unix-y/NeXT-y/pinstripe-y goodness on the Macintosh.

The presentation subsystem in "Longhorn" (code-named "Avalon") provides powerful new APIs for input. This article gives an overview of these APIs: What services are provided to applications, the architecture of the input system, and how new input devices can be supported.

Bill Gates launched the combined VSLive!, Microsoft Mobile DevCon, and AVIOS SpeechTEK conferences on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 with his keynote speech to a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center West. The first of the three demos showed new productivity features for VB developers in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The CTP is the second preview of the next version of VS.NET, formerly known as "Whidbey," scheduled for release in the first half of 2005.

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.

Parts 1 – 6 of this series describe a service domain that represents a collection of comparable or related Web services through a common services entry point. In this article, we discuss how to keep up with the information that is available from the service domain. Why should you and why shouldn't you care about the information? We introduce several ways of using the information and discuss some approaches for optimizing its management.

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.

Microsoft plans to formally announce later Wednesday an update to Windows Mobile, the company's operating system for handhelds and cell phones. The press release is here while a translated article with many screenshots showing the new features of the new Windows Mobile operating system is here (IE now sports SSR, support for Landscape and VGA modes, pixel doubling etc).

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.

Apple has released Xgrid Preview 2, the latest version of its powerful computational clustering software that turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer.