Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.24. "The release is out there (both git trees and as tarballs/patches), and for the next week many kernel developers will be at (or flying into/out of) LCA in Melbourne, so let's hope it's a good one. Nothing earth-shattering happened since -rc8, although the new set of ACPI blacklist entries and some network driver updates makes the diffstat show that there was more than the random sprinkling of one-liners all over the tree. But most of it really is one-liners, and mostly not very exciting ones at that."

The frequency at which Apple is seeding new pre-release builds of its second update to the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system is increasing rapidly, suggesting an official release may be imminent. Fresh on the heels of build 9C20, which was released as a private distribution earlier this week, the Cupertino-based Mac maker on Thursday issued its latest revision of the software update labeled Mac OS X 10.5.2 build 9C23.

"Apple has seeded journalists at three of the nation's most widespread publications - The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Newsweek - with early MacBook Air review units. The first reviews from these publications began cropping up earlier this morning. A detailed summary of each review, and some observations, follow." OSNews will review the MacBook Air too, as soon as Apple NL has review items to send out.

ICANN, the group charged with overseeing the Internet's addressing system, has submitted a report to the US Department of Commerce in which it argues that the time has come to end US oversight. In October 2006, the Department of Commerce and ICANN signed the Joint Project Agreement, a three-year pact that extended Commerce's oversight of the body, while leaving open the possibility that the group would become independent as soon as April of this year. In the new report, ICANN argues that it has already met the requirements for independence and should therefore be freed from oversight.

"VIA's newly launched processor architecture, known for the last three years by its codename, "Isaiah," will keep the company's focus on cost and power intact while taking things in a substantially different direction. In short, this year will see something truly odd happen on the low end of the x86 market: VIA and Intel will, architecturally speaking, switch places. Intel will take a giant step down the power/performance ladder with the debut of Silverthorne/Diamondville, its first in-order x86 processor design since the original Pentium, while VIA will attempt to move up into Intel's territory with its first-ever out-of-order, fully buzzword-compliant processor, codenamed Isaiah. In this brief article, I'll give an overview of Isaiah and of what VIA hopes to accomplish with this new design. Most of the high-level details of Isaiah have been known since at least 2004, when VIA began publicizing the forthcoming processor's general feature list (i.e., 64-bit support, out-of-order execution, vector processing, memory disambiguation, and others). So I'll focus here on a recap of those features and on a broader look at the market that VIA is headed into."

Supposedly, we are looking at screenshots of Windows 7 here. Anyone who has ever looked at Vista will realise these are exactly the same - and that actually makes a lot of sense, so early in a development cycle. In any case, the version number in the winver screenshot actually corresponds to the version number supposedly assigned to the supposedly released M1 build of Windows 7 - but hey, that's just a Photoshop away. Do with this as you please.

The Firebird RDBMS 2008 Roadmap is now publicly available. During this year, Firebird users can expect two final releases (2.1 and 2.5) and the first alpha of FB 3. Many new features are planned, as described in the roadmap. In addition, RC1 of 2.1 has been released.

The KDE desktop environment is going cross-platform with support for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. In addition to porting the core KDE libraries and applications, developers are also porting popular KDE-based software like the Amarok audio player and the KOffice productivity suite.

The OpenJDK Porters Group approved by a unanimous vote the proposal submitted by the recently formed Haiku Java Team to port OpenJDK to Haiku. This makes Haiku the first OS platform to be sponsored by the Porters Group, and it means that the port is now officially part of the OpenJDK family of projects endorsed by Sun. The team already has a mailing list and a project home page; a mercurial repository is also on its way. Team lead Bryan Varner gives his latest update here on his blog.

PT_DENY_ATTACH is a non-standard ptrace() request type that prevents a debugger from attaching to the calling process. Adam Leventhal recently discovered that Leopard extends PT_DENY_ATTACH to prevent introspection into processes using dtrace. This article will cover disabling PT_DENY_ATTACH for all processes on Mac OS X 10.5. Over the previous few years, I've provided similar hacks for both Mac OS X 10.4, and 10.3.

On April 29, SCO will finally have its day in court, but not exactly in the way the Unix and Linux litigation company had planned. If things had gone the way SCO wanted, it would be facing IBM to see how much money it would get for IBM using Unix code in Linux. Instead of that fantasy coming true, SCO will be trying to hang on to what's left of its assets from Novell.

"Last week OpenSuSE 11.0 Alpha 1 was released, and in addition to including KDE 4.0, PulseAudio integration, and various package updates, Alpha 1 features improvements to the OpenSuSE installer. This installer uses Qt4 and is much improved, which warranted us taking a closer look."

The ReactOS team has released version 0.3.4 of its NT compatible operating system and discusses a new and improved release cycle and lists the huge number of updates and improvements since the last release. Some screenshots can been found here.

"In Dean's recent Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: a Milestone post, he highlighted our responsibility to deliver both interoperability (web pages working well across different browsers) and backwards compatibility (web pages working well across different versions of IE). We need to do both, so that IE8 continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 but also makes the development of the next billion pages (in an interoperable way) much easier. Continuing Dean's theme, I’d like to talk about some steps we are taking in IE8 to achieve these goals."