"Everyone is talking about Windows clusters, Unix clusters and Linux cluster. But all we are saying, is that the 20 year-old architecture of clustered OpenVMS can teach these whippersnappers a thing or two. At OpenVMS.org there's a report about an OpenVMS cluster which handles the major processing for the Greater Amsterdam Police and naturally is required 24/7." Read the story at TheInquirer.

This is the third in my series of reviews for Debian-based commercial distros that might be appropriate for SOHO use. The first article covered my exploration of Lindows, the second one focused on Libranet, and this article covers a recently released distro called MEPIS.

2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti announced that XFS has been merged into the 2.4 kernel.

Sun is challenging Microsoft on a new front: the consumer market. Believing its Java Desktop System is "a more effective home and retail solution," the company is negotiating with major retailers Wal-Mart and Office Depot to include the desktop on consumer PCs. Elsewhere, Sun strikes software deal with the United Kingdom: Government to implement Java Desktop, application infrastructure in public sector.

The official release is here and you can start downloading the KDE 3.2-beta2 from here.

A proposal for the handling of MIME types was published by Red Hat's JRB.

If you are a DBA or a database programmer, your manager may have asked you to prepare a breakdown of employees by location and department, or a breakdown of products by category and provider. If your boss is a techie, instead of a breakdown she might have mentioned a pivot table, or, if she likes to use "the right words," a cross-tabulation, Giuseppe Maxia writes. Elsewhere on OnLamp.com another article advises on "Quick and Dirty RDBMS Tuning".

"This online training lesson contains material taken from our introductory courses. This particular section presents the basic approaches to message passing for communication between concurrent tasks. In an actual training course, this section would be preceded by introductory sessions covering the fundamental definitions of embedded and real-time systems, as well as the fundamentals of multi-tasking (priority-based pre-emptive task scheduling)." Read it here.

For a limited time, you can order the full version of Microsoft Services for UNIX 3.0—at no charge (see conditions). A $99 retail value, Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 provides an integrated environment in which to run applications for both Windows and UNIX on a single system. This offer is available only in the United States while supplies last, so act now (offer expires Dec. 31, 2003).

DesktopX is a program that lets you design your own desktop by adding "objects" that can do pretty much anything you might imagine for it. Version 2.0 has just been released and it's a radical re-design that has focused on improving the functionality, performance, and memory use of it. If you don't have DesktopX, you can download it on its own here or get it as part of Object Desktop.

My husband and I are thinking of buying the Canon Optura Xi camcorder soon (in our opinion, the best DV camera at this range). Because I run so many OSes I always have 'embedded' in me this "thing" to only buy supported hardware by the major OSes. I am sure Optura's DV part will work fine with some Linux tools, but then what? How do I easily edit my... masterpiece and burn DVDs or VCDs via an integrated solution and send them to our families in Greece and France?

After spending a few months as a download available only to YDL.net members, Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 ISOs are now freely available. The distro now includes HFS+ support and the 2.4.22-based kernel.

Earlier this year Novell purchased Ximian Software, the primary sponsor of the Mono Project. Novell is committed to providing support for open source development and specifically the Mono Project. There are plans for providing additional services around the Mono Project including support and consulting. Novell is also involved in providing resources for contributors by way of Novell Forge which will become the home for many Mono based projects and a community around Mono. Read the article here.
Update: On other C#/Mono news, the Qt# bindings project is almost on a halt, OSNews learned. Developers wanted to help out the one remaining developer, Marcus Urban.

OSDL has been running performance tests with hackbench to measure the improvement of the scheduler, compared to Linux 2.4.18. A write-up of these results with graphical plots is posted here.