The 0.68 release of the Visopsys OS went live today. It's a maintenance release with the usual array of tweaks and bug fixes, plus a focus on disk I/O performance; the software disk caching was re-written, and lookahead/write caching were added to the IDE driver. Another new feature is secure deletion (shredding) of files, partitions, and disks. Change log here and downloads here.

"k3b is one of the most important applications for many Linux users. The immensely popular and fully-featured CD/DVD writing application has been a mainstay of the standard Linux desktop since its early releases. Since last year, Sebastian Trüg, the initial author and present lead developer of k3b, has been employed by Mandriva both to work on k3b and to work on the Nepomuk desktop project. We asked Sebastian a few questions about k3b, Mandriva and Nepomuk."

"Thanks to the work of one of the most active code contributors lately, Hugo Santos, Haiku is getting a generic FreeBSD network driver compatibility layer that will allow FreeBSD network drivers to be compiled and used in Haiku with few, if any changes. At the time of this writing, not only has Hugo committed the compatibility layer to the Haiku tree, but he has also succeeded in building two FreeBSD drivers (if_em/Intel Pro 1000 and if_le/PCNet) which are now capable of running in Haiku."

Gorm 1.2.1 has been released. "Gorm (Graphical Object Relationship Modeller) is meant to be the counter part to NeXT's Interface Builder. With Gorm designing tough and complex graphical interfaces for your applications can easy and quickly be done using drag & drop, powerful inspectors and teamwork with ProjectCenter."

"Mandriva recently released its first distro of the year, dubbed Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Like previous releases, Spring is available in five editions, two of which can be freely downloaded. I installed and worked with the USD 76 Powerpack edition, which includes support and several gigabytes of packages. Not only does Powerpack score over other multiple CD/DVD free-of-cost distros, it also makes competing non-free distros eat dust."

Microsoft has released patches for 19 vulnerabilities, 14 of which are critical, hitting at holes in Excel, Word, Office, Exchange, Internet Explorer, cryptographic technology and the whopper of them all, the zero-day vulnerability in the DNS Server's use of RPC. The DNS remote code execution vulnerability affects server-grade operating systems, including Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, and only those that have the DNS service enabled, such as Domain Controller, DNS Server or Microsoft Small Business Server configurations.

"We began our week of JavaOne coverage this morning with some of the information shared during the CommunityOne General Session. Now that the day is winding to an end, we have some additional information to pass along on Sun's first-ever CommunityOne event. Outside of the CommunityOne General Session, other tracks throughout the day were on NetBeans, GlassFish, OpenJDK for mobile & embedded environments, OpenSolaris, Web 2.0, Startup Camp, RedMonk's un-conference, and the discussion of Linux versus Solaris."

Ubuntu 7.04 - also known as Feisty Fawn - shines for its excellent software management tools and large catalog of ready-to-install free software applications. Read more at eWeek.

"Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and Windows Vista are two state-of-the-art desktop operating systems. I got this Bi-OS laptop (with Feisty and Vista Business) recently as my desktop replacement. I compare some features of Vista vs. Feisty. Both operating systems have made great progress. Laptop is well built and great for a consultant like me (albeit tad heavy)." More here.

Mayank Sharma from Linux.com tries Mandriva 2007 Spring on several machines. He finds the distro to be very stable, sporting a good package selection, just the documentation a bit sparse.

"It has been a hard year around here but steady progress on Symphony has continued. Symphony OS 2007 will be released either late this month or early next month with several major changes: Ubuntu 7.04 base system, Ubiquity installer, Google Gadgets as desklets, and continued performance improvements."

Xandros today launched Xandros Server Standard Edition 2, a complete, enterprise-grade SMB Linux server package including Xen virtualization and more than 30 other services. The new Xandros Linux server is compatible with existing Windows domain and networking topologies.

"I have been using Mac OS X as my primary OS for almost a year now, but last night I switched back. What spurred it is that my Mac OS X partition crashed and it wouldn't boot back into the OS - I used rescue tools and drive scanners but it appears that the partition just disappeared. I booted into a much smaller NTFS partition and put the Vista install disk in."

The Gentoo Release Engineering project is pleased to announce the much-delayed release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named 'Secret Sauce'. This release met with several delays due to an abnormally high number of security vulnerabilities in large packages which had to be rebuilt using the newer, secure versions of the packages. Update: Screenshots!