"Sony has recently updated their VAIO UX Micro PC line with the UX390N series. This little beast packs the power of a full blown Microsoft Windows Vista computer into a form factor of only 5.91"x3.74"x1.27"x1.50". When you first look at palm sized portable device you may guess it to be a souped up version of the Sony PSP, but if you take a look at the USD 2449.99 sticker price, you will probably guess it does a whole lot more. And that it does."

"On UNIX systems, each system and end-user task is contained within a process. The system creates new processes all the time and processes die when a task finishes or something unexpected happens. Here, learn how to control processes and use a number of commands to peer into your system."

"The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB. Using a now fully integrated installation process, Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 comes with out-of-the-box support for encrypted partitions. This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to the installation system supporting scripts using composed characters and complex languages; the installation system for Debian GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages." Update: Debian 3.1r6 has also been released. Update II: Screenshots, and how to upgrade to it.

DesktopBSD 1.6-RC2 has been released. "Primary changes since 1.6-RC1: improved video detection; no more annoying package database messages when an installation/upgrade failed; upgrading from 1.0 should work fine now; cups problems are hopefully gone; KDE 3.5.6; K3B 1.0."

"After several weeks of discussion the leaders of Compiz and Beryl have agreed that the two communities shall reunite. This decision is supported by both David and Quinn and represents the majority decision of the administrators and developers in each community."

Kimmo Kinnunen wrote yesterday on the GTK+-WebCore developer mailing list that he has imported the Safari 2.0 WebCore branch into GTK+-WebCore. "This means that from the webcore/javascriptcore part, the code is mostly the same as in current Safari. So if there are any crashes, they're not from webcore/javascriptcore part of the codebase with very high probability, rather my code."

"I, Michael Buesch, am one of the maintainers of the GPL'd Linux wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx). The Copyright holders of bcm43xx (which includes me) want to talk to you, OpenBSD bcw developers, about possible GPL license and therefore copyright violations in your bcw driver. We believe that you might have directly copied code out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission, into bcw (licensed under BSD license)." The entire thread can be found here.

The AROS team has published a new status update with a list of improvements. Another important step in AROS customization has been done. Darius Brewka and Georg Steger have added a new decor system to Wanderer, allowing user to edit and change themes. Damir Sijakovic's ICE theme has been used as an example and it is now the default theme for AROS nightly builds. In addition, a USB keyboard driver has been committed, among other things.

Pawel Dawidek announced today that the ZFS filesystem is now part of the FreeBSD operating system. iSCSI, booting, ICLs, and extended attributes are not supported yet.

Comparisons, conjecture, and controversy. Microsoft's new operating system is here, but is it ready for primetime? We spent 30 days with Windows Vista to see if it's worth the leap or if Microsoft should go back to the drawing board.

This review at DesktopLinux.com takes a quick look at the just-released, Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Linux distribution. The author finds it to be easy to install and configure, and a solid desktop platform to use, but notes that the distribution's Beryl 3D graphics support can be challenging to get working.

Apple Inc. has developed an enhancement to its Mac OS X Finder user interface that will allow for different-sized icons within the same window as a means of representing their importance, a recent patent application has revealed.

The Free Software Foundation has released the second draft of version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In addition to general editing, the new draft ties the LGPL more closely to the GNU General Public License (GPL), introduces the concept of a "linked version," and adds a new option for distributing combined works.

In a spat over royalties, the European Commission has declared war on accepted global conventions regarding intellectual property rights.