"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."

BETA3 for the FreeBSD 6.2 release is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. There have been a lot of fixes to many things since BETA2. The most important of the things that have been worked on is the driver for em(4). More info here.

"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.0. This is our 20th release on CD-ROM (and 21st via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of ten years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.0 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system." More here. Update: First review here.

"Today, I'd like to share with you a hidden gem inside of Windows Vista's search capabilities. It's a neat little feature that lets you build one saved search on top of another, and we call it Query Composition. Think composition in the mathematical sense, not in the context of writing an English paper. To explain this feature, I'd like to start by talking a bit about Libraries."

"During tests, Fedora Core 6 impressed eWEEK Labs with the progress it has made toward making Security - Enhanced Linux - and the dramatically improved security protections that SELinux helps afford - more palatable. We also liked the look of Fedora Core's new graphical and command-line tools for managing Xen virtual machines, although, as with every Xen product we've yet tested, plenty of rough spots remain."

"You don't need a Ph.D. in scientific visualization to have some fun with three-dimensional data. Whether you're searching for an unused nook in a cramped disk partition, or trying to find the bloated temp/ folder that's crashing your system, sometimes the flat folder view of a traditional GUI file browser is little help. Luckily, Linux offers a variety of 3-D filesystems that can make your disk usage statistics come alive."

"The simple question 'what's wrong with software patents?' stirs up controversy and divides the IT industry into two camps like no other. Every group has their own ideology about software patents. Those who don't like them claim that they are anti-competitive, that they are tools used by industry giants to crush free and open software, that they are bad for innovation, that they are monopolies. Those who like them claim that they are simply units of intellectual property, to be traded like any other commodity."

"The Haiku Project had its annual conference in Orlando this past weekend, and though I have little experience with BeOS or Haiku, I decided to attend and write about the conference because it's 20 minutes from my home. It's called WalterCon because 'Walter' was one of the proposed names for what was to become a free replacement for BeOS. Be, Inc. may be dead and gone, and the BeOS source code may have been sold and warehoused, but the spirit of Be lives on in Haiku and WalterCon. If only it had a little more developer support, you'd be hearing about the Haiku operating system a lot more often. Heck, you might even be using it."

"With our operating system, the Playstation could very easily be your home CD player, DVD player, MP3 player and home computer, as well as a great game box,” said Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats of the PS3, “This is not an application-limited appliance, this is a full-blown computer. There is no issue of ‘can it do this or that?’ It can do everything." More here.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices swapped roles in a third quarter that wasn't as bad for shipments as some had initially feared, according to new data from Mercury Research. AMD had been making strides in the server market for several quarters, while Intel dominated the notebook market. But momentum swung the other way in the third quarter, with Intel regaining market share in server processors while AMD's notebook processor shipments surged, said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research.

"The next version of Windows is just around the corner, so the next time we discuss software licensing in my course, the EULA for Vista will be front and center. You can read the Microsoft Vista EULA yourself by going to the official Software License page from Microsoft page and searching for Vista. I know many of you have never bothered to read the EULA - who really wants to, after all? - but take a few minutes and get yourself a copy and read it. I'll wait. Back? It's bad, ain't it? Real bad. I mean, previous EULAs weren't anything great - but the Vista EULA is horrendous."