"Sun has a desktop package that can be seriously considered by IT departments planning new rollouts". First look at Java Desktop System shows it has potential, ComputerWorld says.

There's a brand new SuSE Linux 9.0 PRO review on the UnixReview site.

Although MS is looking to rope in Longhorn developers now, the company knows it's in for a long ride.

ActiveState today announced the release of Visual XSLT 2.0 at the Microsoft PDC. Visual XSLT 2.0 addresses customer's demands for a flexible debugger and a Visual Schema Mapper. The Just-In-Time de-bugger doesn't need source code and automatically senses and debugs code; it is the first of its kind for XSLT. The solution also includes a Visual Schema Mapper that has "drag and drop" functionality.

At its Professional Developers Conference this week, Microsoft is taking the wraps off its Longhorn Windows, Yukon SQL Server and Whidbey tool suite. Check back here for news from the Los Angeles event. Articles here, here here, here (lots of good info about the new Longhorn features) and here. Longhorn SDK here, screenshots and video of Longhorn from today conference here, Longhorn Tweak Guide, special access to Longhorn/Whidbey PDC release code. Even more articles here, here and here.

Just a few days after the report that Mandrake 9.2 can fry some LG cdroms (workaround has being issued in the Linux kernel in the meantime), now users complain that Mac OS X Panther renders unusable/fried firewire hard drives, mostly some LaCie models and models that are both USB and FW. In the meantime, MacSlash has posted a collection of bugs found on Panther here and here, while backwards compatibility with Jaguar seems to not be great either. Hopefully 10.3.1 is not too far away!

Here is a review of Mac OS X Panther 10.3, the new offering by Apple, only a few days after its release.

Cygwin is latest contributor on XFree86.org that gets pushed away by the behavior of some of its founding members and the dysfunctionality of XFree86.org. Hopefully, Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, Apple, Sun and others will create a fork (or join Xouvert, X2 or a more 'open' X11.org) in a way that allows truly open development and innovation in X in a faster pace than XFree86's maintainers have allowed so far.

SuSE Linux has enlisted the backing of server-software maker Veritas Software, an important step in supporting the needs of business computing and keeping up with top Linux seller Red Hat. In the meantime, Novell tried to buy SUSE, sources say.

Supercomputer maker Cray said Monday that it is planning to release a line of products based on the Advanced Micro Devices-powered Red Storm machine it is building for the Department of Energy.

This version supports all known versions of glibc, including the new Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL) interface. This represents a major technical advance for Wine, as glibc instability has been a problem throughout 2003. Support for the Dreamweaver MX Studio was added. Dynamic loading of OpenGL is provided, which allows a much greater range of unsupported applications to run, especially games such as Half-Life. Miscellaneous bugfixes were made for Microsoft Office, Quicken, Visio, and Lotus Notes.

The author is one of the top Linux developers around, and a long-time UNIX champion. Fellow Linux developers will benefit from the useful, common-practice shell scripting techniques that the author and his Codemonks Consulting partners employ on a daily basis in their Linux development and applications services work.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates is slated to kick off the company's Professional Developers Conference here Monday with an overview of its latest pre-beta Windows operating system and how it advances the company's .NET platform strategies. Read the reports at InternetNews and at NYTimes (free reg. required).

SGI recently announced a contest. The coder of the OpenGL API demo judged best by a panel of judges will receive a $40,000 Onyx4 UltimateVision visualization machine, running IRIX. The contest is open to US and Canadian residents.