The second KDE 4 developers snapshot is now available. This 3.80.2 release includes source from all the KDE modules. Application developers are strongly advised to work primarily on KDE 4 from now on. This release builds with Qt 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 (but not the 4.2 preview). Packages are available for Kubuntu and currently working through the SUSE buildservice.

At a press conference in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to announce a new partnership between Microsoft and Novell. The unprecedented deal will have Microsoft offering a degree of sales support for Novell's SUSE Linux while both companies work towards better interoperability between their respective operating systems. As part of the agreement, Microsoft also promises not to wield its patent portfolio against SUSE Linux. More here. You can follow the live webcast announcement, by Steve Ballmer, here. Update: Novell has put up a detailed FAQ about this deal.

Google released today a Java client for their Gmail service which works on all Java-enabled cellphones (mobile web-based client also available). Click through to see many screenshots from the app. Having used it for a few hours we conclude that it's very usable, very fast and it can even read and display images and MS/OOo attachments. More reviews on this app here and here. Additionally, now the Google-owned YouTube is preparing for a mobile launch within 2007, while Google is a major partner in the Opera Mini project. Version 3.0-beta was released yesterday. It now supports SSL, RSS feeds and content folding (which unfortunately does not play nice with OSNews' mobile page). Screenshots inside.

Dell's Linux Software Architect blogs on behind-the-scenes moves towards Linux support on Dell client systems and announces a new public mailing list for related discussions. "We put a lot of effort into our Linux offerings on our workstations and servers. On the client side, our efforts are much more behind-the-scenes. We recognize the chicken-and-egg problem though: it has to work before many people will want to buy it; and it won't work unless effort is put into it before people start buying it. So we're cracking the egg, not quite making omlettes."

Jon Hall, president of Linux International, is a passionate spokesman for the open source community and ideal. In this two-part interview, he speaks at length on the progress and challenges for open source, and on the need to recapture a purer vision of education.

While the capabilities of operating systems have improved over the last years, the improvements have largely focused on under the hood changes. New functionality is reaching the user via additional applications which allow her to write a DVD, connect to her mp3 player, download streaming video locally and other tasks which were not present before. But the graphical interface of the computer itself is keeping the same concepts introduced with its appearance. One could argue that the graphical environment of computers is exactly the same for the last 10 years and only cosmetic changes take place in newer versions of operating systems. Moving away from the desktop metaphor is harder than it seems. Even alternative operating systems have embraced the concept instead of exploring new ideas. This article describes a solution which attempts to free the user from the files/folder concept.

Blake Ross helped make Firefox one of the biggest open-source success stories ever. Just wait until you see what he's up to now. Ross's is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox's. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he's building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he's leading the charge with a simple battle cry: "One interface, not two!"

"In this article, see how HAL 9000, the computer in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie , the smartest believable artificial intelligence so far in fiction, could predict equipment failure, answer personal questions, learn to sing 'Bicycle built for Two', and go insane, based on IBM Build to Manage Toolkit components. By the end of this article, you'll see how autonomic computing can be implemented today; determine if there is such a thing as a Hofstadter-Moebius loop in programming; and discover if HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic computer, Heuristic Autonomic Learner, or is simply the first three letters of a prankster holiday that occurs about this time of the year."

Metasploit founder HD Moore has released an exploit for an unpatched vulnerability in the Apple Airport driver that ships with some PowerBook and iMac computers. Moore said the exploit is not related to the Wi-Fi driver flaws discovered and discussed in Aug. 2006 by researchers David Maynor and Jon Ellch at the Black Hat Briefings. Moore, who is collaborating with Ellch on Wi-Fi flaw research, named the exploit after Daring Fireball, a Mac blogger who doubted the Black Hat findings and issued a public challenge to Ellch and Maynor.

Many BeOS enthusiasts were eagerly awaiting the results from the contest Haiku held in order to determine its icon set. People unfamiliar with BeOS won't understand what the fuss is all about; well, BeOS's isometric icon set was one of the defining elements of the look of BeOS. I am happy to report that the icon set for Haiku is almost exactly identical to the svg version of the original BeOS icon set (used in Zeta, among others). On a slightly related note, there's news about Vista's icons as well.

"Mandriva 2007 may be the best distribution I have used. Looking through Mandriva's forum, you see employees of the company who care and are genuinely trying to help. Mandriva offers 'Free as in freedom' versions and versions with propriatery software. You would expect a release like this to be trumpeted. Instead, the release was met with hostility. Forums on tech sites were filled with Linux users cheering for the end of Mandriva. What happened? How did a company that was loved at one time become so unpopular? Is the hostility justified?"

Edgy. Eft. Review. "Dapper Drake was a huge step forward since Breezy Badger. Edgy Eft doesn't impress as much but still brings its lot of innovations and improvements over its predecessor; its artwork is a tiny bit better, its software selection is more up to date, its package manager is better than ever and its new upstart makes it really fast to boot. Of course it doesn't have the desktop and the artwork of Fedora Core 6, or the integrated 3D effects of Mandriva 2007, but it's still in my opinion the best Linux distribution there is and as with every single one of its releases, it just proved it once more."

"How do the latest versions of each browser compare? For this prizefight, we looked at Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's first new Internet browser since 2001 and Mozilla Firefox 2, Mozilla's update of its popular Firefox 1.5 browser released in November 2005." This will be the last Firefox 2 vs. IE7 article. I promise.

"One of the main benefits of an open source WebKit is allowing developers to download nightly browser builds from the WebKit Open Source Project page. Nightly builds allow you as a developer to prepare for changes before they wind up on your users' desktops. This article describes how you can leverage WebKit nightly builds to determine how changes in the framework may affect your web content, Dashboard widgets, or WebKit-based application in future versions of Mac OS X."