The 2-day by invitation only FreeBSD developer summit at BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa has just ended. Over 60 FreeBSD developers attended the summit, along with representatives from large BSD-friendly corporations such as Apple, Yahoo, Nokia, Juniper, NetApp and Ironport. A variety of topics were discussed, such as ZFS, the BLUFFS file system, SMP scalability improvements and the new virtualized network stack. Video recordings from the summit are available, as well as pictures.

"The last time we had looked at the performance of Intel's integrated graphics under Linux with their open-source driver was back in February when testing the GMA 3000 IGP using an Intel DQ965GFEKR motherboard. However, with display drivers constantly improving, we recently carried out some additional Intel Q965 graphics tests along with comparing these numbers to discrete graphics solutions from AMD/ATI and NVIDIA."

"Bill Laing, a General Manager in the Microsoft Windows Server Division, has been quoted as saying that Windows Server 2008 will be the last 32-bit operating system. Bill is a server guy and indeed Windows Server 2008 is the last 32-bit server operating system - all future operating systems for server hardware from Microsoft beyond Windows Server 2008 will be 64-bit. A few folks took Bill's comments on Windows Server and applied them to Windows Client deriving that Windows Vista would be the last 32-bit operating system. That is an incorrect extension. While Windows Vista includes both 32-bit and 64-bit and there is a growing community of drivers for 64-bit Windows Vista we have not decided when Windows Client will follow Windows Server and become 64-bit only."

Mizi Research has updated its graphical user interface framework for consumer electronic devices like mobile phones. Prizm 3.0 has switched to Python as its main application programming language (from Qt), and has gained modern visual effects such as "dragging, sliding, fading and accelerated smart scrolling," the company said. Their devices usually sell in Korea in Samsung touchscreen phones.

Tired of waiting for Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard'? Make the wait easier with tools that add power, pizazz and some Leopard-like features to OS X 10.4 'Tiger' in this 4-page article at ComputerWorld.

Changing some memory parameters on your system can increase performance dramatically, particularly when these parameters are not optimized for the environment which you are running. Part 1 of this series provides an overview of memory on AIX, including a discussion of virtual memory and the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM).

The facelift the AROS project had planned is now complete. Most importantly, due to the recent legal troubles concerning Amiga, the project has changed its name from "Amiga Research Operating System" into "AROS Research Operating System". They have also redone their website. There is also development news; the USB UHCI and OHCI support has been completed, and write support for the FAT filesystem has been added, among other things.

In a completely unanticipated announcement made quietly during a virtualization talk here at WinHEC 2008, Microsoft announced a completely new SKU of Windows Vista, to be entitled Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop. Its purpose will be to enable Vista to run within an enterprise exclusively as virtual machines, managed centrally using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

"With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard pushed back to October, Apple has bought itself more time to tie loose ends in the current Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system and will put forth those fixes via its first 'dot ten' software update in quite some time, AppleInsider has learned. According to those people familiar with the matter, the first pre-release builds of Mac OS X 10.4.10 began making the rounds in Cupertino earlier this month."

A recent Google acquisition of DoubleClick for a whopping USD 3.1 billion has turned many heads. The recent past certainly does not fit into Google's traditional non-aggressive attitude towards acquisitions for monopoly in the market. DoubleClick Inc., a spearhead in ad-serving, is only one of many companies acquired by Google. A comprehensive list can be seen here. Beside Google's acquisitions, this article will also explore some changes in Google's philosophy and potential threats to web community.

GNOME 2.19.2 has been released. "This is our second development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. New features are still arriving, so your mission is simple: go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

Nearly 40 million copies of Windows Vista have been sold in the first 100 days following its release, more than twice the sales of Windows XP over the same time period, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said in his opening keynote here at the 15th annual WinHEC. "We have been amazed by the response to Vista and what has happened in the last 100 days. So, in the first five weeks of shipping Vista, we have matched the installed base of any other operating system provider," Gates told several hundred attendees in an address entitled 'Platform Innovations for Today and Tomorrow'. In addition, Microsoft said that the follow-on to its Windows Server 2008 operating system will be an interim release due to arrive in 2009.

"A while ago Thomas Leonard wrote about Ubuntu integration and asked the question 'Can we get rid of ROX-Session?'. This inspired me to attempt to replace it with the Xfce session manager and it turns out that it is both easy to do and works very well."

GCC 4.2 has been released. The biggest feature in this release is OpenMP support in C, C++ and Fortran. See the changes page for more details.