In October 14th 1996, Matthias Ettrich announced and detailed a new project that was in search of contributers. The project was temporarily dubbed the 'Kool Desktop Environment', later to simply become the 'K Desktop Environment'. Of course, 7 years later and KDE is about to reach version 3.2, consist of 4.5 millions lines of code and represents the effort of nearly 1400 man-years.

"DriverLoader", created by Linuxant Inc, is a revolutionary "compatibility wrapper" allowing standard Windows NDIS 5.0 drivers (the network driver standard used by Windows and on an earlier spec revision by OS/2 too) as shipped by hardware vendors for windows users to be used as-is on Linux x86.

Libranet to ArkLinux: 'An experiment in migrating from one distro to another' can be found at TuxReports.

Elena Novaretti has released a small patch for version 3.5 and 3.9 of AmigaOS adding transparent support for 24-bit PNG icons and alpha channel transparency. Comparison workbench screenshots: 256 color classic icons and 24-bit PNG icons with the patch installed.

Java is designed for secure development and deployment. It is often said that security is incorporated in Java from the ground up and not added as an afterthought. This article is excerpted from the newly published book "J2EE Security for Servlets, EJB's, and Web Services".

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely says that a number of the issues brought up with FreeBSD 4.9 RC2 have been resolved, and the latest release candidate (RC3) is now available for i386.

LinuxElectrons.com is reviewing Red Hat's Fedora Test-3. Screenshots included.

SuSE has updated their site with features of the new SuSE Linux 9.0. Additionally, they released a Live CD based on the 9.0 version (it's the RC-1). Mirrors here.

NetBSD's Steve Woodford announces that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. NetBSD/arm is a collective term for NetBSD running on systems based on ARM Ltd's ARM architecture. Also, NetBSD's Frank van der Linden announced that he has added gdb support to the tree, as a result the NetBSD/amd64 port is now completely crossbuildable. NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors.

An excellent feature has just been committed to OpenBSD-current : pfsync and now CARP. OpenBSD now adds high availability to security. In the meantime, the OpenBSD 3.4 CDs have begin to ship.

The team that brought RISC OS Aemulor has another killer app this autumn for the Risc OS users - Cino: The Iyonix DVD player. Read more Risc OS news at Drobe and IconBar.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released 2.6.0-test8. He listed the most noticeable changes as fixes for: the '/proc/PID/stat' oops, the Athlong prefetch bug causing occasional spurious page faults, serverworks PIO autotuning, cpufreguency calculations and NFS O_DIRECT. Read the changelog at KernelTrap.

GCC 3.3.2 includes numerous new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Grab it here. Additionally, this interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform.

BareFeats has compiled the results of a comparative test utilizing Cinebenc, the best cross-platform benchmarking application the market has to offer.It is interesting to see how the MP 2GHz Opteron and Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz MT compared against the MP 2GHz G5. Here is also a previous benchmark session at Barefeats which was updated recently.