Intel has launched its new line of quad-core Xeon products for the multi-processor server market. Its much-awaited Xeon MP 7300 server platform comprises the new 'Tigerton' quad-core Xeon 7300 series chip, as well as the 'Clarksboro' 7300 chipset.

"Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don’t want the console output to be the limiting factor. I took the burden on me to do a comprehensive comparison of the text through of all possible terminals."

Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm's next-generation (Linux-based too) smartphone platform. My Take: A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device.

Microsoft has failed in its attempt to have its Office Open XML document format fast-tracked straight to the status of an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization. The proposal must now be revised to take into account the negative comments made during the voting process. Microsoft expects that a second vote early next year will result in approval, it said Tuesday. That is by no means certain, however, given the objections raised by some national standards bodies.

The NetBSD Release Engineering Team announced the release of NetBSD 4.0 RC1 today. The release candidate is directly available from the project's FTP server. A list of significant changes and features can be found here. "The NetBSD4.0 release provides numerous significant functional enhancements, including support for many new devices, integration of hundreds of bug fixes, new and updated kernel subsystems, and many user-land enhancements. The result of these improvements is a stable operating system fit for production use that rivals most commercially available systems."

Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0 Beta 2, and concludes: "This beta may not be the end result yet, but there has definitely been a lot of progress since the last one. For the first time I have been able to stop writing about individual features within KDE 4 and start to talk about the level of integration, and general feel of the system to get an impression of how KDE 4.0 will feel like to use."

Opera has released an alpha build of their upcoming 9.5 release. "Following the release of Opera 9 last year, we re-wrote Opera's rendering engine for the coming Opera 9.5 release. As a result, Opera 9.5 contains more than a year's worth of speed, standards and performance improvements."

PC-BSD 1.4 RC1 has been released. "After a month of refinement, the PC-BSD team is pleased to make available the 1.4RC release. This update addresses many of the reported bugs from 1.4BETA, as well as adding working i18n support for international languages. PC-BSD 1.4RC can be downloaded via our mirrors or via Torrent on the 1.4 download page."

Just in time for Fedora 8 test 2 IcedTea has landed in Fedora RawHide. The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from the Sun OpenJDK project using Free Software build tools (gcj) and provides replacements for the non-free binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project. Installing this experimental GPL Java platfom is now as easy as yum install java-1.7.0-icedtea. In addition, Sun has promised to provide a Test Compatibility Kit soon so people can see how 'officially Java' this package really is.

"On the Phoronix Forums we have been running a Q&A with the developers of the Nouveau project. For those out of the loop or new to Linux, the Nouveau project aims to provide an open-source 2D/3D graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware. After collecting a number of questions from our readers, KoalaBR and Marcheu have answered these questions. The questions range from whether there will be open-source SLI support to asking if NVIDIA has ever contacted the Nouveau developers."

Eric S. Raymond writes on his blog: "There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too. OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested."

OpenBSD project creator Theo de Raadt detailed his concerns regarding BSD-licensed code and Dual-BSD/GPL-licensed code being re-licensed under only the GPL (as previously discussed): "Honestly, I was greatly troubled by the situation, because even people like Alan Cox were giving other Linux developers advice to... Break the law. And furthermore, there are even greater potential risks for how the various communities interact." Regarding the concern that the BSD license allows companies to steal code, Theo reflected: "GPL fans said the great problem we would face is that companies would take our BSD code, modify it, and not give back. Nope - the great problem we face is that people would wrap the GPL around our code, and lock us out in the same way that these supposed companies would lock us out."

"With the latest release of Apple's office productivity suite, iWork '08, the Pages application moves into the ranks of full-fledged word processing applications. Previously known more for its page layout capabilities than for its word processing capabilities, Pages now enables users to switch seamlessly between writing and designing documents. In addition, the application offers 140 document templates and a snazzy track-changes feature, both of which work to position iWork '08 as an apt rival to Microsoft's Office 2004 for Mac in the OS X-compatible office productivity arena."

The KDE project has delayed the release of KDE 4.0 by two months. "We, The Release Team, hereby announce that we are extending the KDE 4.0.0 schedule 2 months by inserting an extra 2 Betas, as follows: September 24: Beta3. October 22: Beta4. November 19: Total Release Freeze. November 21: RC1. December 5: RC2. December 20: 4.0.0 tagged. We feel that there are crucial elements of the release that need more development time. The feature freeze (less exemptions) remains in effect."