"With the imminent demise of the product known as Red Hat Linux, many people are asking, "Where do I go next?" For IT decision-makers, the question couldn't come at a worse time. Just as Microsoft is dropping support for their most popular version of Windows, prodding budget-conscious managers to consider Linux on the organization desktop, the best-known Linux distribution is suddenly no longer a part of the solution set at the retail level." Read the article at NewsForge.

BlueEyedOS, an effort to ressurect the BeOS APIs and experience under Linux and X11, switches to the LGPL license from closed source in order to attract more developers.

From Newsforge: "Microsoft has started distributing two online surveys to Linux User Groups and Linux users in general, one asking primarily about home computer use, the other about business use."

I think the best thing you can say about XFce-4 is that it is stable. In my over 6 months of using XFce-4 (used CVS before the release), I have only had one crash (and this was during the CVS version as well). Some other popular Desktop Environments seem too complex for their own good. XFce-4 was a perfect match for me. It had everything that I like in a Desktop Environment, without any of the bloat found elsewhere. XFce 4.0.2 was released yesterday.

The go-mono site reports that the Mono JIT on the PowerPC was able to successfully run the Mono C# compiler to build its first programs. This is by no means complete (exception handling is missing, and Boehm GC seems to fail on MacOS X), but it is getting there.

The KDE Group - a group of KDE and/or Debian developers with a dedication to and interest in both projects - have written this detailed proposal opposing the decision to go with GNOME as the sole UserLinux GUI. Our Take: On Friday I emailed Bruce Perens on the issue, but he didn't reply. Following is my short email to Perens, trying to suggest a solution that might become acceptable by both camps.

Koki from the japanese site jpbe recently interviewed Michael Phipps the project leader of OpenBeOS. The original interview in japanese can be found here. Read more for the english version of the interview.

Subversion is a version control system which aims to replace CVS by incorporating a modern architecture and needed features currently not found on CVS. The latest interim bugfix release of Subversion is ready. This release is to correct for the problems in the 0.35.0 release and affects Windows users only: fix: file handle leak (r8048), fix: UTF-8 path problem (issue #1660).

The XFree86 project released the second RC for their upcoming 4.4.0 X server version.

This message was posted in the ReactOS mailing list: "For those of you who haven't followed the progress with Explorer closely, take a look here. This screenshot was taken with current CVS and Filip's Wine DLL snapshot here. There are still many stability problems (lots of multi-threading issues), unimplemented and buggy ReactOS features, but all in all we're much better shape than I had expected to be at this point in time. If we can keep up this pace, 0.2 will be on time (before WineConf) and will rock!" UPDATE: Quake2 running on ReactOS.

ITBusiness.ca has an interesting success story about how LinuxMagic switched FitnessWorld to Linux and KDE. Although the article does not mention KDE, we know they are using KDE thanks to this KDE Success Story that was submitted to KDE::Enterprise. Our Take: Last night we watched the X-Men 2 DVD and in the feature documentaries on the second DVD disk, in the one regarding the visual effects, one of the SGI animators was clearly using KDE as well.

Apple released a Security update for 10.3.2 and 10.2.8 along with the 10.3.2 OS update for OSX Server.

A brief thread on the lkml discussed whether or not Reiser4 would soon be stable enough to be merged into the 2.6 kernel as an 'experimental filesystem'.

The Linux distributors detail their plans on when they'll be introducing Linux 2.6 into their commercial releases, while the analysts consider what 2.6 will mean to Microsoft and users. Fedora already has some test 2.6 kernels and Slackware now too in its -Current tree.