Andreas Pour is well known to most everyone in the KDE community. Considering that KDE is the leading desktop for Linux, if you are investigating GNU/Linux workstations, you are sure to run into Pour's work. He graciously agreed to participate in a series of exclusive interviews with Open for Business' Timothy R. Butler. In other KDE news, the KDE Project opens the doors to 3rd party developers with the "Extra Gear" initiative.

The GNOME Usability Project is proud to announce the release of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (v1.0), the product of usability engineers, designers, hackers, and Irish wine. The guidelines deliver both specific advice on making effective use of interface elements, as well as the philosophy and general principles behind the guidelines. Read the release announcement (including a plea for interface unity between free software projects), or jump straight to the meat.

The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit 2.6 for WindowsXP & .NET Server contains the tools and documentation you need to design, deploy, and support applications on these platforms. Tools include the latest versions of the Windows Application Verifier that assists developers and testers in locating common compatibility issues during the development cycle, and the Compatibility Administrator that provides access to the necessary compatibility fixes to support legacy applications in Windows.

VectorLinux, a lightweight distribution of GNU/Linux was just released. The new version is called SOHO 1.0, and while it is based on the previous version, VectorLinux v2.5, it still has many enhancements. Features the KDE 3.x desktop including Koffice and the KDE development suite. OpenOffice, AbiWord, the Gimp, Realplayer, Xmms, Mozilla-1.0, Opera 6.x, Cups printing system, scanner support, java runtime, kernel 2.4.18 and several entertaining games are all included. The founder, Robert Lange, is looking for more developers to join him, a new web master and people to try the free download of SOHO or to buy the CD in order to fund the project.

Opera, the self-described "fastest browser on earth," has decided to jettison its legacy code in favor of something a little faster. The Oslo, Norway-based company is on the verge of releasing a trial, or beta, version of Opera 7, which will resemble its predecessor only in superficial ways. The rendering engine--the heart of the browser, which interprets code pulled down from Web servers--has been rewritten from the ground up over the past 18 months.

The first editorial is an interesting take from ExtremeTech about Red Hat's "dual play" in the Linux business, called "RedHat's Astroturfing". The second one, called "Creativity, reliability to drive telematics" is written by Paul Leroux, from QNX Software. Last by not least, David Berlind analyzes the pros and cons of binary compatibility between versions: Is it the holy grail or the red herring?

Microsoft is undergoing a major cultural shift in the way it deals with security, but it has come much later than it should have, is the consensus at the TechEd conference in Brisbane. In the meantime, web servers and corporate PCs are at risk from vulnerabilities in the popular Apache server software and in a component of Microsoft's Windows 2000.

Get the new Lycoris beta 48 from an FTP mirror near you. No announcement was published yet for it.

Intel scientists are putting two chip cores into the same piece of silicon--with promises to improve performance by 'core hopping' and keeping the transistors cooler. Read the report at ZDNews.com. Update: In the meantime, OSNews reader Kelvin Tong tells us that HWExtreme has exclusive pictures and a preview of the AMD "Hammer" Opteron processor.

The new Qt 3.1 upgrade features hundreds of enhancements, TrollTech claims. Among the features are better ActiveX support, Motif integration, while for MacOSX you will find integration with the Appearance Manager, anti-aliased text drawing, and user settings. The Qt OpenGL support for OSX is also greatly improved, and uses the hardware-accelerated drivers. Also, Qt 3.1 offers more classes available for multi-threading, thereby optimizing performance. Elsewhere, GTKmm 1.3.21 for GTK+ 2 was released.

"The creators of the open-source databases MySQL and PostgreSQL are trying to push them further into the enterprise with new features aimed at better support for transactions, database recovery and replication." Read the news at eWeek. On the other hand, VA-Software said that they had to switch SourceForge to IBM's DB2, because their database grows very fast (70 new projects and 700 new users daily) and while they did a move from mySQL to PostgreSQL a year ago (mySQL is faster for smaller dbs, while PostgreSQL scales better), now they have to move again to an even more powerful database, which happens to be proprierty.

"Now Wal-Mart's website is selling $299 PCs that run on an operating system called Lindows (Microsoft is suing over the name), while another Linux brand called Lycoris Desktop LX is about to hit the shelves at CompUSA. The ubiquitous Linux logo, a penguin, is already a hit at places like IBM and much of the U.S. government. Should the rest of us tune him in too?" Read the article at Time.com. On the other hand, eWeek has a kinda opposite article: "Linux vendors are showing a renewed interest in developing a desktop version of the operating system to challenge Microsoft Corp. But many corporate users are simply not ready for—or not interested in—such a product."

As seen over at Deadly.org: "Some Bulgarian fellows made a tiny BSD distro, which is a mix between FreeBSD and OpenBSD, has some ports and other stuff -a. Full install is about 200 megs, the install iso is 64 MB.It can run on low end x86 boxes." More infrormation here.

Justin Armstrong wrote JaysOS, a "toy OS" that runs on the Gameboy Advance. It provides preemptive threads, semaphores, condition variables, and message queues. As of 0.2, it also includes a port of the Waba VM for Java bytecodes. Waba comes with a few interesting demo applets you can try out. The OS apps interact with the world using the "UI Manager". Screenshots and more information available.