"iXsystems announced today a distribution agreement with Fry's Electronics whereby all Fry's stores nationwide will carry PC-BSD Version 1.4, Da Vinci Edition. The agreement marks the first time that the PC-BSD operating system is made available for purchase at Fry's Electronics. PC-BSD is a fully functional desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world. It is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system."

The AROS Show interviews AROS developer Robert Norris about the development of the new web browser for AROS. The name of the web browser is also revealed for the first time. "The browser will be called 'Traveller'. I had already thought of this as a potential name before asking for ideas, and when a couple of people suggested it too I knew it was good."

"Lately we've been talking about a lot of great new features in the latest development trunk of WebKit - features like web fonts, client-side database storage, CSS transforms and CSS animation. These features will likely make it to an official release someday. But I'd like to take a step back and talk about some older features, namely all the great stuff in our recent stable release. Apple recently released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, including Safari 3. The latest Safari is also included in Mac OS X 10.4.11, the latest update to Tiger. A corresponding version is available as the latest Safari for Windows Beta, including the new features and lots of stability and usability improvements. Apple's site can tell you a lot about the new end-user features of Safari 3. But a lot of the goodness is on the inside, in the WebKit engine that powers Safari. Here's a list of ten of the most exciting engine enhancements since the Safari 2 version of WebKit, with lots of details and demos. These features are all included in the WebKit that comes with Safari 3 - you don't have to download nightlies or anything else to get them."

"After seeing Miod Vallat's commit to source-changes@ today, I thought it'd be nice to ask Miod a few questions about mvme88k and the work he did to enable multiprocessor support for the architecture (more information about this hardware platform is available the OpenBSD mvme88k page)."

The 10.4.11 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Tiger and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac. This update also includes Safari 3, the latest version of Apple's web browser. Intel and PPC versions.

Erstwhile bitter rivals Dell and Sun Microsystems are set to announce that Sun's Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems will be supported in all of Dell's servers. Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz plan to make the announcement during a joint appearance at the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 conference today.

Microsoft has released the first public beta of Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, a server operating system for the high-performance computing market. The company has also announced the Parallel Computing Initiative, a programme aimed at creating a set of common development tools across multi-core desktops and clusters. The beta is available for download here and the final version is scheduled for launch in the second half of 2008.

"The Asus Eee PC challenges many conventional assumptions about mobile computing. The daring, diminutive device combines a svelte subnotebook form factor with a unique Linux software platform and a budget-friendly price - factors that could make this unprecedented product a mainstream marvel. Last week, my colleague Jon described the Eee PC as game-changing: a characterization that we will put to the test in this review."

The opensource Windows-compatible operating system ReactOS released a status update today. The highlights are the ability to run OpenOffice.org 2 applications (screenshots), kernel bugfixes, a restructured win32 subsystem, and plans about the next release (December 2007).

"This is the listing of the open bugs that are relatively new, around 2.6.22 and up. They are vaguely classified by specific area," Natalie Protasevich said, posting a current list of bugs each linking to an appropriate bugzilla.kernel.org entry. Andrew Morton reviewed the list, noting 'no response from developers' in response to many of the bugs. David Miller pointed out that in some cases this wasn't true, referring to 46 bug fixes queued in his networking tree and another 10 already pushed upstream, "when someone like me is bug fixing full time, I take massive offense to the impression you're trying to give especially when it's directed at the networking. So turn it down a notch Andrew." Andrew wasn't convinced, "first we need to work out whether we have a problem. If we do this, then we can then have a think about what to do about it. I tried to convince the 2006 KS attendees that we have a problem and I resoundingly failed. People seemed to think that we're doing OK."

Here's a tour of the pre-alpha demo release of GNOME Online Desktop included in Fedora 8. Learn more about what it does and how you can get involved in the project, writes Havoc Pennington.

Delve into some of the compiler options used to build Visual C++ projects and the UNIX and g++ equivalents, take a closer look at the g++ attribute mechanism as it relates to porting, and examines some common problems you might encounter while porting from a 32-bit Windows environment to a 64-bit UNIX environment.

"You can tell that the new PRS-505 is from Sony because 1) it's a gorgeous piece of kit in a tiny package, 2) it has a Memory Stick Pro Duo expansion slot, and 3) it uses proprietary DRM. But the last two points, so unfortunately characteristic of Sony in the last decade, suggest that the company is changing-slowly. Not only does the new Reader sport an SD card slot alongside the Pro Duo slot, but it plays AAC and MP3 files; ATRAC doesn't even make an appearance on the spec sheet. Oh, and did I mention that the Reader is Penguin-powered?"

"With the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft has added a new form of mandatory access control to the core operating system. Internally known as 'integrity levels', this new addition to the security manager allows security controls to be placed on a per-process basis. This is different from the traditional model of per-user security controls used in all prior versions of Windows NT. In this manner, integrity levels are essentially a bolt-on to the existing Windows NT security architecture. While the idea is theoretically sound, there does exist a great possibility for implementation errors with respect to how integrity levels work in practice. Integrity levels are the core of Internet Explorer Protected Mode, a new 'low-rights' mode where Internet Explorer runs without permission to modify most files or registry keys. This places both Internet Explorer and integrity levels as a whole at the forefront of the computer security battle with respect to Windows Vista."