Microsoft on Tuesday will offer a glimpse at future versions of its Visual Studio.Net development tools and highlight a number of additions to the product line. In the meantime, support grows for .Net: A number of Microsoft partners will announce at VSLive products targeted at Microsoft's .Net. Also, Microsoft Corp. on Monday renamed its XDocs application to InfoPath, but declined to say whether this information-gathering tool would ship as part of Office 11, the code name for the next version of Office, or if it would be sold as a stand-alone product.

"There's a strong argument to be made that all the pieces needed for an effective Linux desktop system for the enterprise now exist. Less clear, however, is whether a Linux vendor can collect and package those elements into something that's ready—right out of the box—for the mainstream corporate desktop. This is what SuSE Linux Inc. set out to do with its SuSE Linux Office Desktop." Read the article at eWeek.

Vendors working to parlay the server room successes of Linux into a spot on the mainstream corporate desktop have a powerful ally in KDE Project developers, who've been hard at work extending the performance, polish and functionality of KDE. Read the mini-review at eWeek. Update: Ammai just published their own review about KDE 3.1 under Knoppix.

Beginning next week, people who use Sony Ericsson's P800 mobile phones can download a browser from Opera Software that will let them see bulky Web pages on their tiny screens. On other browser news, Mozilla 1.3 beta was released. Our take: No idea why the media are getting so worked up on Smartphone or Opera browsers for expensive phones, when the real competition and even real money is in the cheap phones that are accesible to most people. The high-end mobile phone market is barely a market. For example, Openwave has a great phone browser, displays XHTML-MP/WCSS/WML etc, however it doesn't make headlines every time they sign a deal. And they are the biggest phone browser vendor worldwide. And then, there is always Access and AU, but they are never mentioned.

Maksim Yevmenkin announces the latest engineering release of the Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD. Updates include new in-kernel RFCOMM implementation with SOCK_STREAM interface, OBEX support, setup scripts and minor bug fixes.

The battle between Sun and Microsoft over inclusion of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in Windows wages on. At stake, according to a U.S. District Court, is the fairness of the fight between Java and .Net. for middleware supremacy. Read the analysis at ZDNet TechUpdate.

Apple today released version 0.2-beta of its X11 for MacOSX, which allows X11-based apps to run side-by-side with native OSX applications while it makes it easier to port X11 apps to the Mac. The new beta adds several enhancements and bug fixes (fixes the Fink library problem among other things). On other Mac-related news, MSN for OSX is nearing release while Internet Explorer 6 is on hold by Microsoft, ThinkSecret reports. Additionally, Apple seeded a new Java 1.4.1 preview to devs.

My CTX AMD K6-300/128 MB RAM/3 GB drive laptop is obviously at the end of its life. I was in the "shopping" process for a laptop for 2 months now, and I considered a number of PC laptops, including the Compaq Presario 1525US. At the end, I decided to get the new 12" Powerbook, came in last week, and I am since then using it as my primary machine. Here is what I think about it.

The fourth installment of our series of Mandrake 9.1 reviews is now available for your consumption. This time, Andrew D. Balsa focuses his attention on the recently released third beta, coming on three CDs. He notes the improvements in the installation routine, marvels at the new desktop features, tries out a few of his "geek hardware" and is pleasantly surprised by their compatibility with the new Mandrake.

Continuing their barrage of system upgrades, Apple just released an upgraded XServe in addition to the long awaited Xraid. The Xserve now comes in two configurations: single or dual 1.33 GHz G4 CPU(s), 256MB or 512MB DDR, Firewire 800 and option Fibre Channel support (200mbs). The Xraid features support for up to 2.5 Terabytes of storage (fourteen drive modules) with built-in Fibre Channel support and support fr upt 512mb of cache memory. Prices start at $2799 for the Xserve and $5999 for the Xraid. Also, Sun updated their servers and lowered the prices, while AMD released the Barton 3000+ chip, which according to various benchmarks on the web falls short of its competitor 3 GHz P4.

"For several years now I have thought longingly about Linux, the power-to-the-people operating system that is said to be as stable as a rock, open and free and the embodiment of everything good in the world - in short, the exact opposite of Microsoft's Windows, both technically and politically." Read the review at Herald Tribune.

Lycoris has made available Build 67 of Desktop/LX.

The XDarwin project announces that a hardware-accelerated version 4.3 is on the horizon which contains significant font integration functionality with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.

From the cool department or from the scare-your-little-brother one: "A University of Tokyo professor claims he and his research team have developed a system that can make you 'invisible.' Engineering Professor Susumu Tachi is in the early stages of technology that he says will eventually enable camouflaged objects to be virtually transparent by wearing an optical device."