"SUSE Linux 9.1 - the first version of the distribution to come out after Novell bought the company late last year - will be available in Australia from May 1. SUSE has the second biggest marketshare among commercial distributions of the open source operating system." Read the review at SMH.com.au.

"My" in Visual Basic 2005 provides a quick and easy method for accessing some of the deeper areas of functionality in the .NET Framework without preventing you from using the Framework directly in any way you choose. In addition to exposing Framework functionality, some areas of My, such as the Forms collection, bring back familiar and convenient programming concepts from earlier versions of VB.

Embattled Linux software maker Lindows announced Tuesday that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of common stock. The filing reveals that Lindows is suing Xandros, which sells a competing desktop Linux package based on products developed by Corel, over a $750,000 loan that Lindows alleges Xandros defaulted on (Lindows and Xandros shared code and some business 2-2.5 years ago but their relationship went sour about 1.5 years ago). That case is still in the discovery phase, according to the filing.

The IA32 boot loader bindings are now mature enough to boot OpenBeOS from a hard drive if the BIOS supports LBA access (which should be supported by every modern BIOS). The kernel itself doesn't have hard drive access yet, so it will panic soon after (which is the intended behaviour at this point).

Can you trust the leading open-source database engines, PostgreSQL and MySQL, to deliver the performance and features that the Oracles, SQL Servers, and DB2s of the world do? Not just yet, but they could offer enough to meet your needs. Find out how they stack up against each other, as well as against the commercial alternatives, writes Tim Conrad.

Apple this week seeded to beta testers the first pre-release build of Mac OS X 10.3.4. In a seed note, Apple said Version 10.3.4 should provide a performance gain when launching non-prebound applications among many other changes, ThinkSecret reports.

Sometimes, algorithms that change the world arise not as research for its own sake, but to answer a pressing need. One example of this type of innovation is encryption, which was created to defend against code-breakers who seek to steal or eavesdrop on vital data, says eCommerceTimes.

Project David is the codename for a new middleware program that sits on top of Linux to enable it to run Windows based applications seemelessly. Flexbeta has more. Editor's Note: With no proof and no source code, there's little reason to regard this as more than a hoax. However, if it's true, it would be a huge development.

CRN is reporting that May will be the release date of the second release candidate of Windows XP SP2. Microsoft executives speak of integrating more features into the new service pack, including a spyware tool. More detials here.

"The iPod has more than 50% of the US market, while iTunes Music Store has been selling 130 million songs per year. Certainly it seems that Apple has everything going for them, but they may in the end lose it in the same manner they lost the desktop market" Rajan R. is editorializing for OSNews' sister site, New Mobile Computing. On a similar note, Real's CEO seems to have taken to heart Steve Jobs' answer to his recent request to open up the DRM format to Real Networks.

GCC 3.4.0 was released (mirrors) and it includes numerous new features, improvements & bug fixes.

The creator of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds, has weighed in on the issue of backporting features from newer Linux kernels into older ones, calling the practice a good thing for the most part. When asked by e-mail to comment for internetnews.com, Torvalds wrote: "I think it makes sense from a company standpoint to basically 'cherry-pick' stuff from the development version that they feel is important to their customers. And in that sense I think the back-porting is actually a very good thing."

The future of CVS, Subversion 1.0.2, is now available in the source releases area.

This article describes how to build a composite custom control with Borland C# Builder for MS .NET. However, once the control is built, you can use it in any other IDE, such as Visual Studio .NET.