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.

The GNOME Development Release 2.5.1: "Hey, at least I'm housebroken", is ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.

The Dot reports that while Qt/Mac has been GPLed since Apple's World Wide Developer Conference 2003, which let everybody think that KOffice and the whole KDE stuff would quickly become native Aqua applications. However, the KDE on Darwin project is not really active and needs more developers.

KernelTrap posted an interview with William Lee Irwin III, aka 'wli', and a step-by-step guide to installing his performance improving -wli patchset.

This is an interesting article on how a 300 node cluster was built, using FreeBSD. A nice bonus with the article is that it has a list of major vendor that work with FreeBSD. Elsewhere, if you ever wanted to graph your network traffic, disk usage, system load, or anything else about your network, servers or workstations, then RRDTool is your best friend and SNMP is it's very sexy spouse. Between the two you can collect data on almost element in your network, either local or remote, and graph it almost any way you want. Read the paper here.

A small community of desktop "skinners" has sprung up around Unsanity's ShapeShifter, a utility for Mac OS X that allows the desktop interface to be customized in highly personal and sometimes strikingly beautiful ways. ShapeShifter, released earlier this month, is a $20 utility that can alter all the elements of the Mac OS X interface, including menus, windows, buttons and boxes.

Kaffe has been released. The announcement mentions many bugfixes, improved support for NIO, JVMPI, JSSE, more merges with GNU Classpath, and code cleanups. Furthermore, work is underway on improving support for running Eclipse3 on kaffe, as well as getting JBoss 3.2.x to run on it.

The Zero Install system removes the need to install software or libraries by running all programs from a network filesystem. The filesystem in question is the Internet as a whole, with an aggressive caching system to make it as fast as (or faster than) traditional systems such as Debian's APT repository, and to allow for offline use. It doesn't require any central authority to maintain it, and allows users to run software without needing a root password. In this editorial, we will see how software is accessed via Zero Install and how we can distribute our own programs through it.

Apache, MySQL, and PHP have become one of the most utilized combinations for developing content driven websites. That being said, lets get to building a web server. This tutorial is designed to guide you through the initial steps of setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Linux. The Linux distribution being utilized for this tutorial is Fedora Core 1, however the steps should be very similar across most distros.

"One persistent misfeature of open source development is thoughtless mimicry, copying the behaviors of other projects without considering if they work or if there are better options under the current circumstances. At best, these practices are conventional wisdom, things that everybody believes even if nobody really remembers why. At worst, they're lies we tell ourselves." Read the rest at OnLamp.com.

Quentin Clark provides an overview of WinFS, including what benefits it produces, what it is, and how it's put together. This MSDN TV episode introduces WinFS as a basis for more detailed presentations.