Mono 0.17 has been released. Check out the release notes for a more detailed list. Many new features as well as plenty of bug fixes. Many new System.Data providers and a more mature System.Web (ASP.NET) which can now be hosted in any web server. A simple test web server to host asp.net has been released as well. This version also integrates Neale's s390 port.

There are certain perennial debates amongst the technical community, constantly revisited with differing outcomes for each person. Linux vs. Windows, KDE vs. Gnome, Mac vs. PC - they are unwinnable arguments, and although the outcome varies overtime with each successive release or new piece of hardware, they consistently gain our attention. When presented with the opportunity to borrow a Macintosh for a little over a month, I jumped at the chance to resolve one of these debates for myself. The question was: Can the Mac replace my PC?

The first open source implementation of the latest specification for enterprise Java is expected in JBoss Group LLC's increasingly popular open source application server next year, Gavin Clarke writes. Read the article at TheRegister.

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.

FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 was just released, download its ISO from an ftp server near you.

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."

"This is my opinion on the various distros that I have tried. I'm not a Linux expert at all. I have been using some flavor of Linux for about 2 years now, and have become proficient with Linux. Here are things that I noticed about some of the distro's that I have tried". Read the article at DesktopLinux.

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

Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. Phoenix 0.5 (Naples) was just released for Linux and Windows. Other recent releases include Opera's 6.11 for Linux/FreeBSD and Opera 6-beta3 for Mac.

"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.

Linux got its first big Hollywood break in 1997 when Venice, California studio Digital Domain (D2) used Linux to render the special effects for the hit movie Titanic. LinuxJournal spoke with D2 while they were in production using Linux with Star Trek: Nemesis, which has a scheduled US release date of December 13, 2002. D2 uses Linux for both renderfarm servers and artist desktops.

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.

The Moho competition is now over, and here are the three lucky winners who will be sent a Registration Code for this great cartoon-making application: Dan Severns (destatnj2 AT hotmail DOT com), Mikael Larsson (gdf759d AT tninet DOT se), Ben Oon (oonyk AT yahoo DOT com). Congratulations!

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.