Network software maker Novell continued its move into the Linux market with the release on Tuesday of its first Linux-based desktop services package.

Show reports from last Saturday's AmigaOS4 event in Bath(UK) are now available here, here and here. Also a short video from the event is available which shows Quake2 running hardware accelerated on AmigaOS4 and a real-time calculating fractal demo.

Data-storage giant EMC Corp. will buy VMware for $635 million. VMWare is the leading vendor of "virtual hardware infrastructure," which allows data center managers to partition servers (and desktops) into seperately-managed parts. VMWare is also important for the OS community because it helps a user run several OSes simultaneously on one machine. EMC's acquisition will certainly steer the product even more toward the enterprise space. Wonder what will happen to the workstation product?

Interchange, though not as well-known as other open source projects like Linux and Apache, nevertheless forms the backbone for many companies' technology efforts, large and small. After being absorbed by Red Hat, then cut loose as that company narrowed its focus, its development community has continued to expand the project, and released version 5.0 yesterday. Read the announcement and the release notes. If you need to build a customized, database-driven web application, check it out.

In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org Mandrake Linux Founder Gael Duval gives an update on the financial status of MandrakeSoft, his opinion on the acceptance of Linux on the desktop, user response to the Mandrake Club, his response to the UserLinux manifesto and the recent Red Hat plans.

The UPS man rang my buzzer. I sat in my chair sweating bullets. Do I even dare? Despite better judgment, I buzzed him in. "Did anyone see you?" I asked in a nervous voice. "Uh, just sign here." He gave me an annoyed look and after getting my John Hancock, he handed me the package. I hurriedly closed my blinds, fearful someone might see the contents as I opened it. The package sat on my coffee table for about an hour while we (that is to say, me and the package) stared each other down. A scene from the cult classic Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits came to mind: "Mum! Dad! Don't touch it! It's pure evil!"

" I am talking about the architecture, problems that can not be solved without incompatibilities or at least a lot of work. A ‘modern GUI-based OS’ is, for me, a OS that does not require a user to know or use a command line tool, even for rare system-administration tasks. That does not mean that it should be impossible to work with the command line and a text editor, but the command line must not be the only way to do an administration task." Read the article at KDEdevelopers.org.

The latest Sun Microsystems Java 1.4.2 release update is out, version 1.4.2_03. The only change in this release deals with a CA certificates update in cacerts file.

This article looks at four open source development environments for working with Python code on Unix-like operating systems. He evaluates two general-purpose editors/environments and two Python-specific ones, and compares the merits of each.

The latest beta of KDE's 3.2, beta 2, was released a few days ago. I installed the provided Fedora RPMs and had a look in this early pre-release version of the popular X11 desktop environment. Six screenshots are included. We look at both the strengths and the weaknesses of the DE.

On Tuesday, developers from both the Debian and KDE projects will announce an ambitious initiative to provide a Linux desktop operating system aimed at the needs of large organizations. By working together the group intends to deliver an integrated solution for the desktop needs of government agencies, educational institutions and enterprises.

The OpenBeOS folks published a new newsletter and includes some interesting readings like the "The "virtualdrive" driver" and the "System Logging". For more BeOS reading, read the Technoids magazine, issue 4 (german only).

"One of the problems of computer security in practice is providing an easy mechanism for the user of a system to take advantage of the security features present in an operating system. A system may have significant security features, but absent an interface that allows the user to easily make use of those features the effective security of the system may be low." Read the PDF paper here. Elsewhere, BBC writes about Panther: "Apple, fed up with playing second string to Windows, has been taking its operating system from strength to strength."

Fundamentally, a XAML page describes the classes that the runtime should create, the property values and event handlers for the instances of the classes, and an object model hierarchy—that is, which instance is the parent of another instance. Read the development article here.