"The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.6, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced, powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. This release includes a number of fixes for KHTML, Kate, kicker, ksysguard, and lots of other applications."

Discover how to use shell programming to modify the AIX System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) to develop, test, and install extensions safely.

As revealed yesterday, Mandriva today released a special version of its Mandriva One 2007 distribution, using the 'Metisse' 3D environment (which is actually not a 3D environment). "Metisse is a window manager developed by the In Situ project. Available under the General Public Licence exclusively for Linux, Metisse differs from a classic 3D desktop ('the cube') in the way that it offers innovative windows interactions, thus enforcing work efficiency."

"Apart from a KDE desktop and applications, the developers of the Pardus 2007 Linux distribution have built an entire distribution from scratch. Pardus, released last month, has its own multilingual installer, custom dependency-resolving package manager, and an INIT system that slashes boot times by several seconds. The distribution has come a long way since its first release in 2005, when it was based on Gentoo and lacked a package manager. Thanks to its custom tools, it's one of the easiest Linux distribution to run and manage."

Genesi has 'announced' it is going to release AmigaOS4 for their EFIKA motherboard as soon as the next release of MorphOS is released. "We have clearly indicated in this thread, we don't need Hyperion's support to port OS4 to the EFIKA - legally or technically." True to the Amiga scene of the last few years, a discussion spanning 300 posts ensued. My take: I actually advocated 'porting' AmigaOS4 to Genesi hardware last year, but I do hope it all happens within the boundaries of the law and that the developers get what they deserve. Update: The latest post asks an interesting question.

Mark Russinovich has started a series of articles regarding Vista's/Longhorn's kernel changes. "This is the first part of a series on what's new in the Windows Vista kernel. In this issue, I'll look at changes in the areas of processes and threads, and in I/O. Future installments will cover memory management, startup and shutdown, reliability and recovery, and security."

GNOME 2.17.90 has been released; it's the sixth development release en route to GNOME 2.18, which is planned for March 2007. "This release marks the start of the UI Freeze. If you break the freeze your picture will be added to the HIG under the heading 'Banned for Life' and will have to live with the stigma of causing the 'worst freeze ever'."

After years breathing AMD's dust, Intel beat its rival to the punch by releasing its quad-core Xeon 5300 'Clovertown' processor for servers in November. But AMD's 'Barcelona' quad-core chip, due to arrive midway through 2007, will be a significant notch faster than the Clovertown chips expected to be on the market at that time, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for server and workstation products. "We expect across a wide variety of workloads for Barcelona to outperform Clovertown by 40 percent," Allen said.

CNet has reviewed Windows Vista, and the concluded: "Perhaps we're spoiled, but after more than five years of development, there's a definite 'Is that all?' feeling about Windows Vista. Like cramming an info-dump into a book report the night before it's due, there certainly are a lot of individual features within the operating system, but the real value lies in their execution - how the user experiences (or doesn't experience) these - and like the info-dump, we came away shaking our heads, disappointed." Additionally, Vista's OEM pricing details are out and about.

Apple on Tuesday released a security update for its QuickTime digital media software in response to a vulnerability discovered by security researchers associated with the Month of Apple Bugs website. In related news, new screenshots of Leopard have been posted to Flickr, while the WWDC this year is planned for June 10 through 15.

"Once upon a time, when DOS walked the earth, the command line was the primary user interface for most of our computers. Then, Windows came along, and Microsoft seemed set on leaving the command prompt to dry up and wither into obscurity. Fortunately, Microsoft has again turned its attention to the command line and, in so doing, has produced one of the most compelling new Windows features eWEEK Labs has ever had the pleasure to test: Windows PowerShell."

Remember the Contiki operating system? A few years back it was used to run web servers and web browsers on really old home computers such as the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. Today Contiki has grown up and moved from being a hobby project to a serious embedded OS used in research into networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. It has matured so much that Adam Dunkels, its creator, today announced his PhD thesis on Contiki and its components; protothreads and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack. It is an interesting direction for a niche hobby OS to take and probably quite different from what people expected Contiki to become when it first was released.

"Using the experimental Mozilla XForms extension, you can process XForms in your browser today. While not yet deployed widely enough for use on the public Internet, XForms may be suitable for some intranet applications. This article demonstrates basic XForms processing as currently supported by Firefox and the Mozilla XForms plug-in."

"Before Vim 7.0 was released last May, I usually had six or seven xterms or Konsole windows open, each with a single Vim session in which I was editing a single file. This takes up a lot of screen space, and isn't very efficient. With Vim 7.0, users now have the option of using tabs within Vim. With Vim's tab features you can consolidate all your sessions into one window and move between files more easily."