Rational Software Corp is joining Big Blue's stable of industry leaders-turned-business units after IBM announced its $2.1bn acquisition of the application modeling and design specialist. The news is a blow to Microsoft Corp, which on Friday conceded executives had "talked internally" about an acquisition of Rational. Rational's XDE software modeling tool, launched in February, sat inside Microsoft' Visual Studio.NET integrated development environment (IDE) in addition to IBM's WebSphere. Read the article at ComputerWire.

Acheron writes: "Spotted this on Deadly.org today. Four University of Waterloo students are working on adding SMP support to the OpenBSD kernel as their 4th year Computer Engineering Design Project. Their website can be found at Spinlocks.org. Best of luck to them."

Saturday evening here, nothing more exciting to do... let's suggest some geek/tech gifts for you or your loved ones, for this Christmas.

"What got me started on all this was a recent conversation I had with Ming Poon, the Xandros VP for software development, in which he explained why Xandros eschewed KDE's generic UNIX file manager in favor of a home-grown Xandros File Manager , that's tightly linked to the Linux OS. Now building a file manager has to be a huge task, and, in Ming's case, it's been his pet project ever since his days a manager of Corel Linux. Three questions come to mind: Why did they do it? Was it worth the effort? What’s the future of the XFM?" The article is focusing in the tweaked Xandros file manager.

We were the first to inform you about the buyout of gobeProductive 3.x by starter FreeRadicalSoftware (headed also by the Gobe CEO) back in August. One of the ideas was to make gobeProductive GPL (a beta Linux version already exists). Unfortunately, it seems that FreeRadicalSoftware might not succeed in this. Read more for Gobe's and FreeRadical's Scott Lindsey's email in the Gobe user mailing list regarding the status, as it was sent by OSNews readers and GP3 users Chris Rupnik and Greg. Update: Gobe's Tom Hoke comments here and Scott Lindsey comments here.

If you've used Linux for more than ten minutes, you've almost certainly come across the nightmare that is package management. You know what I mean - dependancy hell has become legendary and it's no exagguration to say that one of the most offputting aspects of Linux for a new user is the lack of InstallShield type 3 click installs. This article looks at how we ended up in the quagmire of RPM and dependancy hell, and then moves on to talk about a possible solution in the form of autopackage. It takes a high level overview of how autopackage works and what it's capable of. If you want more technical details, check out the website. Finally, this article assumes only that you're interested, not that you have any Linux experience.