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.

iGeek has some interesting essays on Panther's user interface and features, including a review of the highly-regarded Expose. Other articles include "Panes and Eye Cues"and Multi-Users and Panther.

NeoLinkComputers features a review of Libranet 2.8.1.

Here comes the 9th test release of Linux 2.6.0 and looking good with Linus Torvalds saying he's pleased with all developments since test7 and that the stability freeze was a good move. New features include Serial-ATA support and XFS fixes.

The PDF-based Beyond Magazine issue 2 is out, an interesting weekend reading. It includes articles about the *BSD, Rebol, Amiga, Games and old platforms, multimedia, an interview with Scot Hacker (author of "BeOS Bible", today an OSX user), Linux, OpenBeOS, a review of BeOS Max Edition 3.0 and more. Additionally, the German Technoids issue #3 is out too.

The Darwin team announced the availability of the source code for Darwin 7.0. These sources correspond to Mac OS X 10.3, and are available via the web. Also, the CVS repository has been updated for gcc, gdb, cups, efax, gimp-print, tcl, Rendezvous, StreamingServer, and HeaderDoc.

The Slackware-based VectorLinux receives a review from MadPenguin. Read it here.

SharpDevelop is an open-source (GPL) IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on the .NET platform (Mono port in the works). This 0.98 release has seen a complete rewrite of the text editor (it is now much faster), which also should be now much easier reuseable as a control in other applications. Also new by (very) popular request is the Tools/Options/Text Editor- Highlighting panel. It allows you to modify the syntax highlighting that is used inside #develop.

DirectX has been providing game developers with a great platform for rich and fast-paced games on Windows for many years. As these platform technologies advance to embrace the concepts of "Managed" programming, DirectX rises to meet the challenge head on.