Sun Microsystems-led Java Community Process Tuesday launched the latest iteration of its program, JCP 2.5, making it easier for Java-loving developers to write to the language with its focus on open-source licensing.

"MandrakeSoft PPC developer Stew Benedict has been working hard behind the scenes to give Mac users a look at how Mandrake Linux 9.1 PPC is shaping up. This is a great opportunity to take an early peek at KDE 3.1 Beta2, XFree 4.2.1, Gimp 1.2.3, Koffice 1.2, and many others." Read more and check out screenshots at MandrakeForum.

There are enormous amounts of information now available about evaluating, and examining Linux for the desktop. Almost every vendor/distribution is making pitches for the desktop. The quality of the software has improved, and continues to improve. In my personal tests, there are still some missing elements that I thought I would convey to you the reader. Some of my points may have answers, and solutions available. I may not be aware of them however, so be aware of this and I look forward to your responses in the comments area below the article.

"PalmSource has offered us a glimpse of the next milestone for PalmOS, version 6.0 due for release next year. Version 6.0 will be as dramatic a change for the platform as OS X was for Apple, or NT was for Microsoft, and represents the culmination of work from the former Be team Palm acquired last year." Read the report at TheRegister.

Here is a poll we put together to better understand the nature of the OSNews readers. Please tell us about the level of experience you got with programming.

Saw the following while reading the latest Gnome Summary (discussion about the summary, here). HP from Red Hat wrote to GnomeDesktop.org: "The Eclipse IDE hasn't gotten much attention in the GNOME world but is a promising IDE with a GTK 2 interface. It's been making progress recently; they now have a decent C/C++ editor (the CDT) and the GTK 2 port works fairly well. See below for some screenshots and info on how to try out the Eclipse CDT."

Microsoft Corp. has told beta testers of Office 11, its next-version Office desktop productivity suite, that the product will only work with the Windows 2000 operating system with Service Pack 3 installed, Windows XP and later desktop releases. While Office 11 is slated for release next year, today Win9x/ME/NT OSes still hold about 52% of the overall OS market, and by next year's Office release, this is still expected to be around 40%. This is a tremendous amount of sales getting wasted (Office is the main income for Microsoft), but Microsoft said that this decision was mostly taken in order to incorporate new technologies on Office that are only available on the 2k/XP OSes, and also for security reasons ("Windows 9x is inherently insecure" Sloan Crayton of Microsoft said).

Guillaume Maillard's article for OSNews regarding XFree86's speed the other day has started a long-ish and interesting discussion on the XFree86 mailing list about how they can speed up things. Many developers from the XFree86 core team, Xig, Red Hat, Compaq and others have joined the discussion.

Linux distributor SuSE is hoping to get desktop users to switch to its operating system with a new edition of its software specifically designed for office workers--including software that allows it to run Microsoft Office and other Windows applications. Read the report at ZDNews.

Critics have slated a Microsoft document on its upcoming Palladium digital rights software as containing several outright "lies". The 1,500-word frequently asked questions (FAQs) paper gives some details about how Palladium will work and how it relates to digital rights management and the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance. Read the rest at VNUnet. Update: Another article about Palladium, here.

The Middleware Company (market leader in enterprise Java training and consulting) has performed a new comparison of the performance and scalability of J2EE and .NET based on the familiar Pet Store application. This time, the Middleware Company has re-coded the J2EE Petstore and optimized the implementation for performance. Their report show that .NET outperforms Java in most of the specific tests they conducted. Lots of discussion already here.

Build 60 (aka Update3b) is now available for Lycoris. Changelog:

The latest blast of great distros continues with Xandros Desktop. Xandros is another debian based distro, geared toward the desktop and promising good Windows compatibility. Our initial impression of Xandros is very positive. It lives up to a lot of its potential, with a few drawbacks. Read the review.

After what many took to be the software's death knell, Sun has put Solaris for Intel processors on a stronger footing. Sun Microsystems plans broader backing for a version of its Solaris operating system geared for Intel processors, the server maker plans to announce on Friday. They also announced an update to its application server software along with plans to offer a free version of the product.