One of the founders of the open-source software initiative, Bruce Perens, is planning to release a new version of Linux to challenge Red Hat's enterprise version of the operating system, and fill the hole left in the consumer market since Red Hat announced it would no longer sell a consumer version in retail stores.

The Active Objects version of the Oberon operating system running under windows was updated today to version alpha 1.5. AOS Oberon is a descendant of the Oberon system designed by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht in the late 1980's. Enhancements to the AOS system include multitasking and MP aware objects.

Grid components need to talk to each other. The distributor needs to talk to the grid providers, the providers need to talk back, and clients and management tools need to talk to the distributor and providers. Providers may need to talk to each other, or they may need to look up information from another machine to determine information or status information from the grid. In this tutorial the author looks at ways to handle communication in a Python grid framework, from the basics of the TCP/IP system to the simplified, externally managed e-mail solution.

KDE 3.2 will introduce an improved configuration framework, known as KConfig XT. This new framework extends, not deprecates, the current KDE configuration API. But if Gnome and KDE continue to have a different API for configuration, how easy freedesktop.org's goal would be to uniform the backends of the two popular DEs? We spoke to freedesktop.org's founder, Havoc Pennington, and here is what he replied after having a quick look at the new KDE API: UPDATE: Read on for KDE/SuSE's Waldo Bastian reply too:

The first official beta of the new Debian installer was released on November the 9th. New goodies include, but are by no means limited to: automatic hardware detection, support for LVM, and support for the non-Linux ports such as Debian-HURD and Debian-*BSD.

Hewlett-Packard delays one Unix server improvement and backs away from another, and Sun Microsystems responds with a promotion to try to lure customers affected by the situation. Read the story at News.com.

The 10.3.1 Update via Software Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications, services and technologies: FileVault, Printing, WebDav, and FireWire 800 drives. This update also includes the latest Security Updates.

Learn to use the rich set of controls in the .NET Compact Framework, including the DataGrid control, the TreeView, and other advanced Windows controls. This sample chapter discusses reference types, the object-oriented features of C#, and exception handling.

Led by a surge in the amount of data being analyzed in data warehouses, the world's largest databases are pushing new heights as they double and triple in size, according to a survey.

Syllable 0.5.1 is now available. Syllable 0.5.1 fixes some of the bugs users encountered in Syllable 0.5.0, and also adds yet more functionality with an experimental USB Mass Storage driver and Ogg Vorbis audio plugin. Read on for the upgrade details.

Software giant Microsoft and start-up VMware are bringing closer to reality a technology for running multiple instances of an operating system on a single computer.

The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS-5.0. This major milestone features a new method with strong emphasis on building a correct compilation environment and base libraries independent from the host system. Release 5.0 features the Linux kernel version 2.4.22, the GNU C Library (glibc) 2.3.2, the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) 3.3.1 and a bootloader change from LILO to GRUB, amongst other package upgrades.

A new player dares to enter the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long. XGI (eXtreme Graphics Innovation), based in Taiwan, comes at the market leaders with a line of cards for a whole lot less money. Tom's Hardware looks at XGI's product range, and offer results of a beta model from XGI´s top model Volari Duo V8 Ultra. The site also has a benchmark article on the latest Nvidia cards Vs the latest Radeons, but it is interesting to see some new blood in the market that have left S3, SiS, Matrox, Trident and Intel i8xx as secondary players or in 'survival mode'.

"To be truly free in the 21st century, we have to ignore the flashy graphics and really get inside our computers" says the Guardian, while Slashdot runs a story titled: "Tangible Interfaces for Computers".