We've been talking about desktop Linux in the business world for years. in 2008, it seems, a lot has changed and improved, and a lot has stayed the same. A Computerworld article takes a look at the state of desktop Linux in the enterprise, and examines the benefits and the pitfalls, looks at the various vendors and their offerings, and talks about how to work well with Windows and other commonly-used platforms and applications.

Dru Lavigne's very useful book turns the arcana of FreeBSD into a comprehensible set of tools.

"A year ago, page after page of ink was spilled by prophets of doom fretting about the iPhone and how it would surely not be as good as this or that other phone. Were they right or did the first year of the iPhone live up to its hype?"

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister offers a primer in defense of desktop Linux in corporate environments. With tips on choosing the right distribution, migrating to Linux-friendly business applications, and bridging the Windows/Linux divide in heterogeneous environments, the article provides adequate ammunition for assuaging the desktop-Linux fears of cautious corporate types.

Quantum computers could become a reality very soon, opening up some fantastic possibilities -- including tele-portation, says Richard Gray.

Yesterday we reported on rumours that Xandros would acquire Linspire. The official press release won't go out until tomorrow, but Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos answered a set of questions about the acquisition, so read on for an inside scoop on the Xandros-Linspire acquisition and what it means for both companies.

The ReactOS project has released version 0.3.5 of their ambitious operating system. ReactOS aims to be a "ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface." This new version comes packed with improvements.

Most reviews - so far - of openSUSE 11.0 have been quite positive, but that doesn't automatically mean everybody is happy. TechReview offers some criticism of the latest offering from openSUSE. "openSUSE 11.0 is a difficult system to qualify. Highlights include good availability of current packages and YAST GUI configuration tools for some advanced features. However, these advantages are largely eclipsed by a chaotic, dysfunctional package management system and marginal performance. New Linux users with more complex network configurations or challenging hardware may be forced to use openSUSE due to its unique innovations in GUI system configuration. Yet, experienced and inexperienced users alike may find themselves increasingly frustrated by the grave lack of refinement in what is an otherwise capable Linux distribution."

In a classic case of "two more weeks", the MorphOS team has actually finally really I'm-not-kidding-you released MorphOS 2.0. This release was long-awaited, and comes packed with so many new features they might as well have called it MorphOS 3.0. "The MorphOS development is proud to announce the public release of the much anticipated version 2.0 of MorphOS. For an overview of the included new features and updates, please read our release notes. A description of the hardware requirements and installation procedures can be found here."

We've already said quite a few words on this one already, so we are going to leave it at a short announcement today. Today, Monday 30 June 2008, marks the last day of sales for Windows XP, the seven year old operating system a lot of people really don't want to let go. Windows Vista is Microsoft's sole desktop operating system now, whether people like it or not. Windows XP will still be available via backdoors and on netbooks, but it won't be available at retailers anymore (some might still have some stock left, though). Feel free to place your obituary in the comments. To me, Windows XP was like cheese: it got better with age.

Through all the Windows and Microsoft bashing on the intertubes, it's almost easy to forget that Windows does, in fact, have quite a few positive aspects as well. One of those aspects is the modularity of its installation system, which allows you to create your custom installation image of Windows - with relative ease. Sadly, Microsoft decided to keep this ability away from normal users, making it a sort of OEM tool only. Lucky for us, there's a tool called vLite/nLite which allows us to slipstream fixes, applications, and drivers into the installation image as we please. This functionality of course also made its way to the 'underground' community, who used it to produce something called TinyXP. APCMag decided to take a look at it.

The open source world is currently debating the merits - if any - of synchronising the release schedules of several of the bigger, key projects that make up a Linux distribution. The discussion was started by Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, and continued as a back and forth between the Ubuntu leader and KDE's Aaron Seigo, but of course other members of the community discussed right along on blogs and other venues. Sander, developer of Coccinella (an open-source Jabber client) provides some insights into the whole discussion.

"Maybe I'm just naive, but designing a graphics API such that all image data had to be sent over a socket to another process every time the image needed to be drawn seems like complete idiocy. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the X Window System forces a program to do, and exactly what Cairo does when drawing images in Linux - a full copy of the image data, send to another process, no less, every time it is drawn. One would think there would be some room for improvement. Unsurprisingly, others felt the same way about X, and decided to write an extension, Xlib Shm or XShm for short, that allows images to placed in a shared memory segment from which the X server reads which allows the program to avoid the memory copy. GTK already makes use of the XShm extension, and it seems like a good idea to see if Gecko couldn't do the same."

Apple has already announced the successor to Leopard, called Snow Leopard, during the WWDC not too long ago. They explained that Snow Leopard would not focus on user-visible features, but instead would deliver performance improvements and resource footprint reductions. One of the measures Apple has taken is the size reduction of application bundles, which has resulted in dramatic weight loss for a lot of applications. AppleInsider has found out what exactly Apple has been doing to lose that much weight.