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".

"The UK government has a 'level playing field' policy for use of Open Source Software, but although it is supposed to be considering "OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements", this does not seem to have produced much in the way of significant deployments or contracts. And who is to blame for this apparent lack of movement? A smoking pistol placed before a Parliamentary Committee last week seemed to implicate that well-known partisan of Open Source Software IBM." TheRegister reports. And all this while the press is expecting IBM to give a talk at Desktop Linux Consortium's conference on Monday about Linux on the desktop.

The Desktop Linux Consortium has developed an exclusive one-day event, hosted by Boston University, which will include the first program ever to offer an in-depth exploration of Linux on the desktop.

After 1-2 years of waiting, Microsoft has finally updated their Windows Media Player for OSX and brings version 9 to the Mac. Along with it, it also brings DRM and a Safari browser plugin. Now, someone go tell Yahoo! to fix their code so the Safari WMV/A plugin can work with launch.yahoo.com.

"Apple thoroughly overhauled a large portion of its server operating system in this release. This is the most significant change to the Mac OS since Apple moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X" says the AFP548 web site on their review of Mac OS X Server Panther.

ISOs and Changelog information about Mandrake's AMD64-RC1 Linux can be found here.

At an Apple financial analyst conference on Wednesday CEO Steve Jobs admitted that Apple makes no revenue from the online download service, the iTunes Music Store, that he launched in April. As iTMS is the leading download service, with 80 per cent market share (or so Jobs claimed), where's your 99 cents per song going?

While Intel's Extreme Edition is coming out soon but with crazy prices, AMD on Thursday sketched out its strategy for the PC and cell phone markets for the next two years at its annual analysts' meeting and disclosed its plans for another multibillion-dollar chip fabrication facility, or fab.

One popular Open Source RAD tool is QT Designer which is part of the QT package. If you run the KDE desktop, QT will be installed already, and QT Designer may be installed as well. DevChannel features the tutorial.

Debian is widely considered the Linux distribution with the best package management tool, APT and one of the largest software bases (>13,000). However, the installation horror stories kept me away. Nevertheless, eager to try it out, I failed to install various other Debian GNU/Linux based distributions. Some failed to boot even after I tried to reinstall for the fourth time, and others just couldn’t detect my hardware. While Knoppix is highly recommended, I decided to stick with hard-drive based distros (Although it is the distribution of choice for LiveCDs). Then came Libranet.

In his new book "Illustrator CS for Dummies," Ted Alspach, Adobe's Group Product Manager for Illustration Products, advises new computer buyers to get a PC: "As of 2003, Windows systems have taken a decisive lead over Macs when it comes to performance. The difference is most apparent with graphics applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator, but you''ll notice it with other applications as well. If you?'re thinking of purchasing a new system, and speed and responsiveness is important (or at least more important than the feel of the OS, I suggest getting a zippy PC over a (comparably) sluggish Mac". This is not the first time Adobe (Apple's #1 third party software house) pushes its customers towards the PC. The previous time it ended with Apple's PR firing back at Adobe through the media.