"rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around - nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution."

Microsoft said it will soon release a new version of its Visual Studio toolset for Windows Vista development. Jay Roxe, group product manager for Visual Studio, said Microsoft will introduce a new release of the Visual Studio targeting Vista development, known as Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista, as soon as March 5 but possibly as late as March 12 depending on when internal developers clear the code for general use.

Recently, Canonical released Herd 5, the last alpha release of Ubuntu 7.04. Masuran.org took a quick look at this preview release, and concluded: "Ubuntu 7.04 will be a very sweet release. I can only hope that the new Gnome Control Center will be the default instead of the current menu structure and that desktop effects like Beryl or Compiz get a more prominent place in this wonderful operating system."

The Syllable team has released Syllabe 0.6.3. This release includes a 'cleaner, fresher looking desktop', USB cd-rom drivers, gigabit ethernet drivers, improved media support, initial printing support via CUPS, automatic GRUB installation, as well as many other new drivers and bug fixes.

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published. It features an introduction to GTK+ cross-platform application development, an interview with Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson about the Tango Project, the first article of a series about free desktop companies, and a letter from the editor. Writers in this edition are John D. Ramsdell, Alexandre Prokoudine, Sri Ramkrishna, and Jim Hodapp.

"Java 5 added a number of powerful language features: generics, enumerations, annotations, autoboxing, and the enhanced for loop. However, many shops are still tied to JDK 1.4 or earlier and may be for some time to come. But it's still be possible for those developers to take advantage of these powerful language features while continuing to deploy on earlier JVMs. Brian Goetz returns from his hiatus in this installment of Java theory and practice to demonstrate how."

The fourth beta of eComStation 2.0 has been released. Some of the new features include better wireless support, the Lucide document viewer, the Psi/2 instant messenger, SAMBA, and much more. "This is the fourth beta release of the eComStation 2.0. This product is available for download to all registered eComStation customers with active Software Subscription Services."

"The performance of desktop computers increases year by year. This gives the programmers great opportunities to further improve the desktop experience of the users. However, what should you do when you have an old computer that is not capable of running the latest and hottest software? How can you benefit from the great software that is X.org when you can't run a desktop that takes advantage of its best features? No need for upgrading your PC, when you can have a usable alternative with the current one. Let me introduce you to Enlightenment E17 - the window manager with minimal hardware requirements that may amaze you."

"This is a step by step tutorial on how to install the server component of Puppet (puppetmaster) on one machine, and the Puppet client (puppetd) on another. We then perform a simple test to make sure Puppet is working properly. If you're not familiar with Puppet, it's a configuration automation tool that allows you to centralize management of the various *nix flavors running on your network. Puppet supports central management of the important aspects of your systems, such as: files, packages, users, services, cron, mounts, etc."

Though Red Hat is poised to roll out its much-anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release shortly, work still continues on previous versions of RHEL. This week Red Hat rolled out a beta release of its fifth update to RHEL 4 officially tagged Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, providing users with a small taste of the virtualization that is to come in RHEL 5.

RISC OS Open is to manage the RISC OS allocations service after Alan Glover was said to have stepped down from the role. The list was maintained by Alan for several years on a voluntary basis. Now seemingly with the blessing of both Castle, the owners of RISC OS and developers of ROS 5, and RISCOS Ltd, developers of RISC OS 4 and 6, RISC OS Open have offered to fill Alan's shoes. The database is used by developers to officially reserve resources for new products and software, such as filetypes and system variable names. Castle boss Jack Lillingston said ROOL were this week "officially authorised" to take over the allocations system from Alan.

"Almost a year ago the Linux WLAN developers announced the switch to a new WLAN subsystem. Today the new system finally found its way into the mm kernel tree of Andrew Morton. In May and April 2006 it became clear that the devicescape WLAN stack will be the future base for the Linux WLAN drivers. The aim was to overcome the current situation of having several different subsystems for different drivers and to create a common, well documented subsystem. The new stack will feature a reworked driver for Broadcom bcm43xx drivers as well as a Ralink rt2x00 driver. And, as already mentioned, Intel's ipw3945 driver will be implemented without the need for a proprietary deamon."

It is rare for me to post a follow up to a review. However, this time I am left with no choice. Remember the television I reviewed? It was a fairly positive review; despite a few annoying glitches, I found the TV to be excellent value for money. Well, apparently, there's a clear cut reason why this television set is cheap. Read and weep.

Herd 5 of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has been released (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu). Improvements include VPN plugins for Network Manager, easier access to desktop effects (Compiz), and much more. Read about Herd 5, and download it.