"After a long and arduous journey that included a suspended validation last year, the Open Source Software Institute has announced that OpenSSL has regained its FIPS 140-2 validation and is now available for download. The validation process, which normally lasts a few months, took an astounding five years to complete, and those involved with the projects say they are already devising ways to avoid such long delays in future validations."

"One of the highlights of my recent trip to Europe was getting the chance to publicly show off some of the new features in our next release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework (codenamed 'Orcas') for the first time publicly. You can download the deck I presented here . You can also watch a version of the Belgium talk. Orcas is going to be a pretty exciting release, and contains a ton of great functionality that I think you will really love. I'll be drilling down into more details of it over the next few months in many more blog posts."

When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

This is a long review of modern Word Processors. Part 1 published today covers Open Office (open source cross platform), as well as MS Word 2007, and WordPerfect X3.

With the Sonnet library for KDE 4, developer Jacob Rideout hopes to reinvigorate the field of desktop linguistics by adding automatic language detection and other innovative features. Sonnet is to be for KDE 4 what KSpell 2 is for the current version of the K Desktop Environment, providing spell-checking facilities to applications as diverse as the Konqueror Web browser, Kopete instant messenger, and KWord office software. Unlike KSpell, however, it will also provide grammar checking, multilingual tools, and perhaps even translation, dictionary, and thesaurus functionality across all of KDE.

UNIX has a dialect all its own and you will find with the UNIX command-line, there are many ways to skin a cat. Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, shares his extensive knowledge and experience with command-line combinations to help you expand your mastery of the UNIX language and in the command-line in particular.

YouTube has cool video showing Windows games using DirectX running inside VMware Fusion for Mac OS X. This is demonstrating full DirectX 8.1 support inside Windows XP virtual machines.

Examine three traps you could fall in when porting Java Web applications from Windows to AIX, and learn how to maneuver around them.

Samsung is following Apple, MS & LG in the trend where cellphones involve "big, wide touchscreens" as their main look and feel. Their Ultrasmart F700 phone has a qwerty keyboard, 2.8" widescreen, 5 MP camera and 3G support. We are not sure at this point if this is a smartphone which allows you to develop and run native applications or if it's just a glorified "feature phone". The whole interface is based on Adobe's Flash while a recent press release along with the claim of "full HTML browsing" makes us speculate that the phone possibly uses the Opera web browser -- possibly on top of Linux.

"I have a huge list of all of the tweaks that have been done to the operating system but I'll save that for next week. Also, if you're wondering, you can expect Windows Mobile 6 devices in the marketplace worldwide by second quarter 2007." More here (screenshots). Betas of WinMob6 also had integrated VoIP support via SIP in them, but it doesn't seem that this was announced along the other features.

Apple plans to crank up the anti-Vista rhetoric at its international chain of retail stores later this week, the latest move in a broader bid by the Mac maker to undermine the new operating system release from rival Microsoft. The campaign, set to get underway this Saturday, will include new store displays and employee t-shirts gently mocking Vista as little more than a washed-up attempt at a modern operating system, those familiar with the matter say. In a multi-page training manual made available through the company's internal retail system this week, Apple challenged its employees to learn and tout the Mac's many existing advantages over Vista-equipped Windows PCs.

Roughly two months after the initial launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft software development leader Ben Fathi said his company is pleased with the security, performance and feedback it has received regarding its newest operating system. Seated in a quiet briefing room removed from the pressing mass of humanity coursing through ongoing RSA Conference 2007, Fathi, corporate vice president of development of Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division, appears at ease, and even happy discussing the topic of Vista security. The Onion has its own take, while CNet also has some things to say.

"The ROX Desktop is a lightweight alternative to GNOME or KDE built around the ROX-Filer file manager. The project's name is an abbreviation of 'RISC OS on X'. The ROX Desktop's performance is reminiscent of IceWM, and it's noticeably faster opening programs than GNOME or KDE. However, its speed comes at the expense of a needlessly redundant default configuration, and some users may balk at some of the assumptions its design makes about how they prefer to work."

Linux Tech Daily reviewed Sabayon Linux, and concludes: "In the few weeks I have been using it, Sabayon has become one of my favorite Linux distributions. The developers have done a very nice job, particularly for a newer distribution. It is great for the whole spectrum of Linux users, from a new user to a seasoned vet. It is very simple with the potential to be as complicated as you wish. If you have been curious about Gentoo but put off by the installation, I heartily recommend Sabayon."