"Well, it was a long time coming, but I've been through the trenches and come up, sucking chest wound and all, with the Ars review of font management programs. I've also succeeded in not completely losing my mind while the developers updated the apps, nullifying half my criticisms in the process. Giving a lot of time to these programs in a production setting is crucial to seeing how they perform on a daily basis, and I am confident I've thrown enough varied scenarios at each to find out where they succeed and fail."

The Russian site Mobile-Review reviews Nokia's second version of their WebKit web browser (which was derived from WebCore/KHTML). This new unreleased-yet version offers WML support, opening links in new windows, display rotation, saving of any image, password manager, offline browsing, ATOM feed support, FlashLite 2.0 (no, this has no YouTube or other fancy Flash support) and much more. The first smartphones to offer WebKit's 2.0 browser will be the Nokia 6290 and N95 (which they will be running the new Symbian S60 3.1 version) that are scheduled to be released around April '07. If we were allowed for our own share of speculation, we would say that Apple's and Google's upcoming phones will be using a port of this open source browser too.

Those who intend to install a Linux distribution on a Sony PlayStation 3 will be pleased to learn that Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is now available for free download. Originally released on 27 November, Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is a Fedora-based distribution tailored to run on Sony PlayStation 3. It features a graphical installation program and includes the Linux kernel 2.6.16, X.Org 7.0 (3D acceleration not supported), Enlightenment 17 as the default desktop (KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.14 are also available), Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 and other popular open source software applications for desktops, servers, media playback and software development.

Apart from a new newsletter, ReactOS has also published its sixth interview with one of the developers. Art Yerkes, born in Philadelphia, PA, USA in 1974. He's been involved with ReactOS since 2002 and contributed primarily to the keyboard code in win32k and the network code. Lately much of the work has been networking related, as well as slowly giving birth to a PowerPC architecture port.

"Proprietary kernel modules are flaky, out of date, and the bane of a Linux professional's existence - right? Maybe not. This three-part (part I | part II | part III) series makes a case for formalizing the uneasy truce between GPL-clean and 'tainted' modules."

"In February 2003, the program 'Open Source and Open Source Software for the Dutch government' started, funded by the Dutch government. One of the main tasks was to make the government independent from single software suppliers, among which are Microsoft and SAP. After three years, the effort starts bearing fruit. Ten big municipalities - together 2.7 million inhabitants and including Amsterdam and The Hague - signed a manifest. I'll try to explain what's in the manifest, what that might mean for the future, and for the monopoly of Microsoft in the Dutch government."

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 6.2 has been released. "All problems we felt needed to be addressed before 6.2 could be released have been taken care of. Unless further testing turns up something new RC2, which is available now for dowloading, will be the last of the Release Candidates and 6.2-RELEASE should be ready in about 2 weeks."

Get an overview of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-related enhancements in the AIX 5L operating system V5.3 TL5 update. This lets clients configure and manage multiple systems with a single set of user identity configuration information, and it simplifies system administration.

After a month of furiously shopping gifts for your friends and family, you might want to get a small gift to yourself, a cellphone on the budget. Hi-Mobile sent us in for a review two extremely affordable cellphones that don't lack features. The first one is the popular Motorola SLVR L7 (just $140) and the other one is the less popular --but with 3G and web capabilities-- LG U8500 (aka U880, just $180).

The magnussoft ZETA 1.5 Pro is a major upgrade over the ZETA 1.21. It provides lots of new features and enhancements like SAMBA, multi-user, new device drivers etc. The product can be pre-ordered for 29 Euros and it has an expected shipping date of 2007/01/15.

Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month. On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. Update by Thom: Ars thinks the situation is hot air, mostly, something I agree with (a cracker already has to have login credentials for the flaws to be of any use).

The Asterisk dev team has released Asterisk 1.4.0, the first in the 1.4 series. The Asterisk project releases a major version about once a year. This series includes T.38 Fax over IP passthrough support, HTML manager, a new version of AEL (Asterisk Extension Language), IMAP storage of voicemail, Jabber/GoogleTalk integration, a jitterbuffer for RTP, whisper paging, and many more other new features.

This is a first of a series of articles which aim to provide a complete and working example of an Interview (Qt4 MVC framework) model. The model is to hold information about a 3D scene for use with OpenGL renderers like QGLWidget. The first thing to do when designing a model is to thing what is the purpose of making it. In this case, I want the model to store information about a 3D scene which can then be rendered using OpenGL (QGLWidget). The scene is to consist of some objects, which can be defined using various ways offered by the OpenGL specification. Part 2 and part 3 are also published.

Examine key parts of the Z shell (zsh) and how to use its features to ease your UNIX system administration tasks. Z shell is a popular alternative to the original Bourne and Korn shells. It provides an impressive range of additional functionality, including improvements for completing different commands, files, and paths automatically, and for binding keys to functions and operations.