In a press conference held today at LinuxWorld 2004 in New York, members of the old X consortium, some members of the disbanded XFree86 core developer group, and Havoc Pennington of freedesktop.org announced that X.org and XFree86 have essentially merged, and that the reformed group is working together to bring "not just more eye candy but new functionality" to the X server for Linux and Unix. Our Take: We wonder what this means for Keith Packard's X implementation hosted at fd.o. Update: Apparently the above is not accurate, only a few (one?) developers joined X.org.

During an inteview with NewsForge at LinuxWorld, MandrakeSoft CEO Francois Bancilhon said the company is releasing financial results today that show a profit. "Now, he said, "we can move to the next step, which is to grow it." In the meantime, Mandrake Linux 10-beta1 was released today.

This is the second part of Pudge's review of Mac OS X Server 10.3 on Slashdot.

"It's all well and good to call Linux mature, but one of the most painful phrases in the IT industry proves it's not. That phrase is "end-to-end," and among the major hardware players out there, it's a surprisingly taboo concept. That is, surprisingly enough, except for one vendor - Solaris worshipper Sun" says TheRegister, while Computer Associates say that "First we had the PC generation. Then the Internet generation. And now we're in the midst of the Linux generation. And it's not too soon to join."

Today we host a long and interesting interview with President & COO of Lindows.com, Kevin Carmony. We discuss about the desktop, the OSS community, Microsoft, LindowsOS 5 and much more. More over, just for the next couple of days, Lindows.com offers the LindowsOS Developer Edition 4.5 for free to the OSNews readers! Read more for details on how to use the OSNews text coupon and download this digital version of LindowsOS free of charge.

If all goes well, this summer I'll be building a new house. I've owned a few houses before, some of them built in the 1920s and 30s, and full of all the charm and quirks of an old house, and a couple that were pretty new, with the lack of craftsmanship and imagination that's typical in most new construction in the USA today. But this time I'm building a custom home, just to my specifications, so I can have whatever features I want, limited only by my imagination (and budget). I'd like to integrate some home automation features into the house, and include wiring for future expansion.