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".

"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.