Exactly four years after the release of Allegro 3.0 for DOS, the team announced the release of a new major version, Allegro 4.0. This release is a very important step in Allegro's development; 4.0 officially brings multi-platform support and it is now very stable. Allegro is a game library distributed freely, supporting the following platforms: DOS, Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris), Windows, and BeOS (MacOS and QNX ports are in alpha stage).

It is always tough to find nice gifts for the holidays that your geek friends will appreciate. Even if you would like to buy something special this Christmas, just for yourself, we will help you choose. Jon Campbell has put together a list of... geek-oriented devices and softare to make your life easier when choosing gifts. Inside you will find which PC game, gaming console, software, mp3 player etc you could buy for the holidays.

The Windows XP Application Compatibility Update is a package of software updates that address common application issues, helping Windows XP either to support these applications or helping to avoid common issues users may experience with these applications. Microsoft recommends downloading this compatibility update if you are having problems with one of the applications this update is designed to support. The second is the Euro Conversion Tool: The Euro Conversion tool allows currency migration to the euro for user locales within the European Union. This tool does not change currency settings for user locales outside of the European Union.

The new version of the PHP programming language, PHP 4.1.0, includes several other key improvements: A new input interface for improved security (read below), Highly improved performance in general, Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows. The multithreaded server modules under Windows (ISAPI, Apache, etc.) perform as much as 30 times faster under load! We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows. Versioning support for extensions. Right now it's barely being used, but the infrastructure was put in place to support separate version numbers for different extensions. The negative side effect is that loading extensions that were built against old versions of PHP will now result in a crash, instead of in a nice clear message. Make sure you only use extensions built with PHP 4.1.0. Turn-key output compression support. Lots of fixes and new functions.

TimeSys Linux GPL is a full Linux distribution for all supported embedded boards that includes everything needed to develop, deploy, and maintain an embedded platform, including not only (according to the company) the world's lowest-latency Linux kernel, but also all the libraries, tool chains, utilities, drivers, scripts, and documentation, all distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). TimeSys Linux GPL consists of a powerful, fully featured, preemptible Linux kernel and all other components needed to extend a standard Linux distribution to support predictable, extremely low-latency response. The fully preemptible capabilities mean the kernel has bounded, mutex-based kernel locking with a new fixed priority scheduler, schedulable (meaning the developer sets the priorities) interrupt handlers, and schedulable extended interrupt handlers, including the IP stack.

Many computer users who want to try out Linux or Linux users who only access the Internet via dial-up, resort on buying cheap, Linux or FreeBSD, CDs from CheapBytes, UnixCD, Walnut Creek etc. Most of these cheap CDs are based on well known Linux distributions. This business is extremely common and perfectly legal so far, as it is going on since 1994 without any problems. You could buy, let's say, the latest version of Red Hat Linux for less than $5. But Red Hat now puts an end in these deals regarding their software.

Microsoft has released a document titled: "Why Microsoft Windows XP Embedded and Not Embedded Linux?" The Linux crowd did not find it very objective so the embedded-related LinuxDevices web site is organizing a response to this document via talkbacks.

More than 1.5 years has past since the last release of the BlackBox window manager, and its development seems to have stopped. However, based on the latest version of BlackBox's sources, FluxBox was born. The FluxBox X11 window manager fixes a number of problems found in the original BlackBox and it introduces some new GUI concepts like the use of the tabs along with the addition of some more tradititional functionality like iconbar, keygrabbers and more.

"Like dueling superpowers, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft appear to be facing two choices in promoting their respective Web security initiatives: detente or a state of constant conflict. Sun CEO Scott McNealy on Thursday renewed his push for the Liberty Alliance Project, a multi-company attempt to counter Microsoft's Passport identity-authentication system. In a keynote address at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, McNealy trumpeted the recent addition of major partners to the alliance." Read the rest of the story at ZDNews.

"I'm going to be honest. For this article, I was planning to show you how to get ext3 up and running on your system. Although that's what I said I'd do, I'm not going to do it. Andrew Morton's excellent "Using the ext3 filesystem in 2.4 kernels" page already does a great job of explaining how to ext3-enable your system, so there's no need for me to repeat all the basics here. Instead, I'm going to delve into some meatier ext3 topics, ones that I think you'll find very useful." Part 8 for this great series of articles. Get links for the previous articles here.

A new version, beta 3, of the gobeProductive 3 office suite (6 MB) was released yesterday containing a number of bug fixes. In related news, Ability Office 2002 (13 MB) was recently released and it features table support for Write, PDF creation, MS Access 2000/XP mdb compatible, merge cells for Spreadsheet and more.

Netscape has released their latest browser, Netscape 6.21 which is based on the Mozilla technology, containing a number of bug fixes. There is a version for Linux, MacOS and Windows. In the meantime, Opera released the second technology preview for Linux for version 6, while MacOS only recently got their second beta for Opera 5.

"Many 'gurus' teaching new users about Linux make it look harder than it needs to be, and apparently fail to explain that yes, you can make PowerPoint-style presentations in Linux, you can view Web Pages that use Flash animation and other "glitz" features, and that you can manage all your files though simple "point, click, drag and drop" visual interfaces. Could the biggest problem with Linux usability be that most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?" Robert Miller's excellent editorial found on NewsForge.

A new source snapshot of RTMK was released today, the first in ten months. This new release includes a totally rewritten kernel and a PowerPC port as well. RMTK is still in early development stages, but the GUI for it is already underway. Crust is its name, developed by the same person who writes RTMK.