Kristian Vander Vliet, aka Vanders, has been working on a document that explains how to port drivers to Syllable. This document first starts off as a primer on how to write drivers for Syllable. Then the document shows how to port a driver from Linux to Syllable. Kristian chooses to focus on network drivers and ported the broadcom tg3 driver from Linux while writing this document.

OS X is more appealing to enterprises as a desktop operating system than ever before and although it is unlikely to take market share away from Windows, the Mac could reduce the number of Linux-based desktops, according to research group Gartner. In a report published by Gartner this week titled Enterprise Mac Clients Remain Limited, but Apple's Appeal is Growing, analysts Michael Silver, Neil MacDonald, Ray Wagner and Brian Prentice, said that administrators will most likely have to prepare for more Mac systems in their environment even though OS X is "not a suitable enterprise wide platform". Ars weighs in on the issue as well.

Microsoft has hit back at critics, including IBM, which voted against approving the company's Office OpenXML format as an Ecma standard, claiming it is nothing more than a vendor-dictated specification that documents proprietary products via XML. Ecma International announced the approval of the new standard Dec. 6 following a meeting of its general assembly and said it will begin the fast track process for adoption of the Office OpenXML formats as an ISO international standard in January 2007.

Microsoft on Thursday released to manufacturing Exchange Server 2007, a product developers say they 'bet the company on'. According to Exchange team lead Terry Myerson, Microsoft has 120,000 mailboxes running on Exchange 2007, with 200 partners utilizing the software for another 55000. Acting as a unified messaging server, Exchange 2007 handles e-mail, calendaring, faxes and even voicemail.

According to research carried out by French firm Xiti Monitor, use of the Firefox browser continues to grow in Europe. Since April this year, the geeky alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer gained an extra four percent of the market across the continent. According to Xiti's research, the browser is now used by some 23.2 per cent of European PC web surfers - up from 19.4% in April.

Freespire 2.0 Alpha2 (1.1.73) is now available for download. "Merged Upstart boot scripts, improved boot time noticed; updated ATI Drivers to current version; enhanced Nvidia support; added knetworkmanager; and much more."

Aaron Digulla established the Amiga Research Operating System or AROS in 1995. He discusses the early days and the development through the years of AROS.

The holiday season hasn't gone exactly as Microsoft had hoped and Ballmer sits down with CNET News.com to discuss life after Vista, battling the iPod, and the rising importance of mobile devices.

Most current Intel and AMD CPUs, as well as almost every Macintosh model from the last few years, geekbenched and compared. Interesting results if you just want to have an overall generic idea of how fast is what. Interesting to see that my 12" 867 Mhz Powerbook G4 is at least 6 times slower than a new MacBook Pro or that new Core2Duo CPUs at 2 GHz are way faster than my pretty recent 3 GHz P4 (which came with hyperthreading and 64bit support nonetheless). Technology flies fast past you!

GNOME 2.17.3 has been released: "This is our third development release on the road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. You all know what you have to do now. Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

Palm has effectively committed itself to producing handheld devices based on the Palm OS - which it no longer owns - by agreeing to pay USD 44m for a perpetual licence for the source code underlying the Garnet incarnation of the operating system. The move is tantamount to Palm re-acquiring PalmSource.

Pegasos.org has (one of) the (only) first reviews of the Efika, the system on a chip thing from Genesi (or bPlan? I lost track). "What can I say? It's a great piece of hardware. bPlan lives up to our expectations yet again. They even exceeded them about its media capabilities. For thin client or tiny desktop usage it will work just fine as long as you choose a low footprint window manager. As a network workgroup server I can't see any difficulties with this hardware. Configure it and you're set."

In common with a lot of people who used to use RISCOS, I don't use it now and that is the focus of this article: Why don't I use it any more and what would it take to make me use it again? Of course, an article of this sort still has worth as there is bound to be some degree of correlation between my feelings, experiences and hopes in relation to the platform and those other people.

Michael Loeffler has announced the release of OpenSUSE 10.2 to the ftp servers. "As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give special mention to the redesigned GNOME and KDE desktop, Firefox 2.0, ext3 as new default file system, support for internal SD card readers, new power managment and last but not least our improved package management." Update: Screenshots.