MINIX3 has received some new interesting ports. "Links, an advanced text-based www browser, and also Links-2, a version of links that displays webpages in an X window." Screenshots included.

"It's been awhile since I've done one of these but this is certainly a pivotal year in skinning. The term 'skinning' has really expanded in what it means. Today, skinning is loosely used to describe customizing in general. From phones, to PDAs, to computer cases, skinning has become an all purpose term. But for our purposes, we're going to stick with customizing the user experience of personal computers (primarily PC and Macintosh). This article will give a head's up on where I think, in my highly biased way, things stand and where I think they're going."

Hewlett-Packard is closing custom deals for thousands of desktop PCs running Linux, which has the company assessing the possibility of offering factory-loaded Linux systems, an HP executive said. "We are involved in a number of massive deals for Linux desktops, and those are the kinds of things that are indicators of critical mass. So we are really looking at it very hard," said Doug Small, worldwide director of open source and Linux marketing at HP. "We are in a massive deal right now for multi-thousands of units of a desktop opportunity for Linux. That's an indicator." He declined to give details about the deals.

3Dfx died in the fourth quarter of 2000 and Windows XP came to life a year after. But seven years after, drivers for 3dfx cards still appear. First of all, it is nearly incredible that enthusiast community managed to support an operating system which was still in the works. Secondly - it is incredible that drivers that support both 32- and 64-bit Windows have just came out.

"Although the .NET vs. Java war is basically over for control of the Windows desktop, where .NET is sure to become the managed language of choice for new Windows desktop applications, there is a new battle brewing. That battle is for the Linux desktop. Now that Java has been open sourced under the GPL, even the most strict of the 'free software only' distributions can start bundling it and integrating it into their Linux distributions out of the box."

Augmented Reality is the overlapping of digital information and physical environment. Sci-Fi has often portrayed A.R. as interactive floating transparent computer screens projected into the air, or perhaps the most absolute example: standing inside an entirely computer generated world.

"We have compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of Ubuntu and started a performance comparison of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, but how does the performance of the upcoming Feisty Fawn release compare to that of Fedora 7? In this article we have enclosed benchmarks from Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, Fedora 7 Test 2, and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5. In gaming and desktop benchmarks, which of these Linux distributions is faster?"

"The FreeBSD project has received approval from Intel to redistribute firmware for several Intel-based PRO/Wireless devices in the base FreeBSD operating system. The inclusion of firmware for popular Intel wireless devices means that users of FreeBSD will have native wireless support for many Centrino-branded Intel PRO/Wireless devices without downloading additional software. This approval includes firmware for the Intel 2100, 2200BG, 2225BG, 2915ABG, and the 3945ABG devices."

If the press preview day for Microsoft's annual TechFest research fair is any indication of Redmond's future plans, search will become an increasingly larger part of the company's overall business. Demonstrations of various search technologies dominated opening remarks by Microsoft Research presenters Tuesday.

Documentary evidence that Microsoft considered abandoning Office for Mac in order to cause 'a great deal of harm' to Apple has emerged. An emailed memo from Microsoft-founder Bill Gates to then Mac Business Unit chief Ben Waldman dated June 1997 talks about morale in the Mac Office development camp. At that time Microsoft's senior management were considering dumping Mac support. The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time.

Microsoft's Live OneCare security software has failed tests which check how well it spots and stops malicious programs designed to attack Windows. OneCare was the only failure among 17 anti-virus programs tested by the AV Comparatives organisation. Microsoft's software only spotted 82.4% of the 500000 viruses that the independent group subjected it to. The test is the second in less than a month that Microsoft's anti-virus software has failed.

If you live in the United States, you are probably affected by a law passed by Congress in 2005 which turned the daylight savings system upside-down. Computers are, obviously, affected by this as well. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains how to update your Linux computers to the new DST rules: "To make sure your Linux system knows when DST is, this year and ever on, you need to update your zoneinfo file, or replace it with one that contains the new rules." In addition, even though Apple has provided a fix for Mac OS X, this fix does not work for Macs running 10.3.9 or lower. Apple does provide a fix. This is where a freeware utility also comes into play.

"Here, Jon Schwartz, UAC Architect, and Chris Corio, UAC Technical Program Manager, discuss, in detail, the history of UAC, the architecture and design of UAC, the new security model of Vista (we are all standard users, gone are the days of running as admin by default on Windows), what happens when a UAC security dialog is invoked, how UAC impacts developers, how UAC will evolve, etc."

Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones, whose work has centered around the Open XML document format, now says the so-called format war with OpenDocument is officially over. The winner, he says, is both. Jones made the statement in a blog post over the weekend following the release by Novell of an Open XML translator for OpenOffice. The plug-in enables the free, open source productivity suite to open documents created in the Microsoft format, as well as saving OpenDocument files into Open XML.