Microsoft watchers have two interesting stories to follow this week. First is the new Intellectual Property (IP) licensing scheme. The second is a feverish round speculation (just a rumor) that Microsoft will buy AMD. Both tie into an older story about plans for the next generation Xbox.

"Slackware Linux is not your ordinary Linux distribution. For starters, it rarely figures in news headlines, preferring to keep a low profile instead. Its developers have stubbornly resisted any attempts to make their users' lives easier: the distribution provides no graphical configuration utilities, it's package management does not resolve dependencies and its simple, text-mode installer has undergone very few changes in years. Yet, Slackare Linux remains one of the top 5 Linux distributions in use today. What is the reason for its tight hold on many users?" Read the article at DistroWatch.

The IT advisory firm expects the Longhorn operating system to be released between late 2006 and mid-2008, but that the release could be delayed even more.

A well-known figure in the Gnome community, Ximian hacker Ettore Perazzoli passed away last night (here pictured at GUADEC 2001). We do not know the cause of the death, but the Ximian employees blog about the sad news here. This comes as a shock to many, especially as this is the second Ximian person to have passed away recently. Chema Celorio died exactly a month ago during a sky diving event. Our condolences to both families and to their friends at Ximian and Novell.

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.