For all of you who plan to use the web for your holiday shopping, I wanted to let you know that we made some updates to the OSNews Price Comparison Shop. As always, you can find it on the left side of the site, under the ad or at osnews.pricegrabber.com. We now have a search field that will take you directly to a comparison of prices for the item that you enter. If you can't find what you're looking for at PG, you may want to try NewMobileComputing's Price Comparison, which is powered by Dealtime.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures.

IBM e-business architect Chris Walden is your guide through a nine-part developerWorks series on moving your operational skills from a Windows to a Linux environment. He covers everything from logging to networking, and from the command-line to help systems etc.

On December 1st MandrakeSoft announced a new product MandrakeMove based on the KDE Desktop. KDE::Enterprise caught up with Gaël Duval to ask a few questions about MandrakeMove and KDE.

Performance enthusiasts Jack Shirazi & Kirk Pepperdine, Director & CTO of JavaPerformanceTuning, follow performance discussions all over the Internet to see what's troubling Java developers. While surfing the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.java, they came across some interesting low-level performance tuning questions. In this installment of Eye on performance, they dive into some bytecode analysis to try and answer some of these questions.

Lindows.com, in an effort to combat Microsoft's sway in the internation PC market, has organized a new initiative, ChoicePC. ChoicePC will fund efforts to diversify the OS market (more info on this available in the latest Michael's Minutes). For $100, a user can get a lifetime membership to Lindows.com, including a free download of all future releases of LindowsOS, a lifetime membership to the Click N Run Warehouse, and more. Certainly a good deal with the price of commercial Linux rising. Update: Justification.

Trolltech today announced the release of Qt, version 3.3.0 beta 1.Trolltech also iIntroduces the Qt Solutions: they provide platform and industry specific tools and components, as well as cutting-edge components that are too new to include directly in the Qt framework releases.

KDE developers George Staikos and Aaron J. Seigo joined in "The Linux Show". The archived version of the show is now available for download.

The purpose of this paper is to provide analysis on the Linux operating system along with Open Source software in general. Discussion will include benefits of the operating system, some of its downfalls, and the direction where Linux and the Open Source movement is headed. It is targeted specifically for IT managers and CIO's who are considering Linux Distribution rollouts to replace their existing IT systems. Lastly conclusions and recommendations will be made. This paper was created primarily as a research paper however it includes some personal experiences, and experiences derived from other Linux users.

Denso and Toshiba jointly develop world's first multi OS environment for car navigation systems, which supports µITRON and Microsoft Windows Automotive. Check our NMC site for more embedded news.

Apple this week continued seeding new pre-release builds of Mac OS X 10.3.2 to developers, sources said. The company also detailed the update’s bug fixes to the High Level Toolbox frameworks. Also, Apple is to launch next-generation ‘New iMac’ desktops with magnesium-alloy cases early next year.

MadPenguin published two reviews of Mandrake 9.2: a peer review and one of the download edition.

A handful of recent online attacks on free and open-source software servers has open-source developers looking over their shoulders.

A few weeks ago we published an article titled "The Great Mac OS X 10.4 Wish List", detailing a few personal wishes for the next version of OSX. Later I learned that quite a few Apple engineers read the article and so it felt good that the time spent writing the article was not just a voice in the void. A reader emailed me a few days ago asking me to do the same for other OSes and DEs. So here is my personal wish-list for a future version of Gnome. Please tell us about your own Gnome wish list in the comment section provided.