Software developer Stardock has unveiled its first-wave Windows Vista plans for its desktop enhancement suite, Object Desktop. Amongst the Vista-specific software it is working on is a Windows Sidebar gadget creation extention for DesktopX (which will support WPF/.NET creations too) and a Windows Vista specific version of WindowBlinds.

The 'Slug' has gained much-improved Linux support, thanks to a new Debian installer that targets the device. The first release candidate of the debian-installer for Debian's forthcoming 'Etch' distribution was released yesterday, offering nearly complete support to the Linksys USD 99 NSLU2 NAS gadget.

"D-Bus 1.0 was officially released last week. Developed by FreeDesktop.org, D-Bus is an open source interprocess communication system created to promote interoperability between various Linux desktop environments by providing a cohesive common platform for internal system and application messaging. D-Bus, which has been under active development for four years, is already used extensively in the GNOME environment and will eventually replace DCOP in KDE."

"Casual Ubuntu users may have registered surprise when they first booted the distribution's Edgy Eft release this past October. Back at the beginning of the Edgy development cycle, much was made of the formation of a new, dedicated Art Team to develop a fresh look for the backgrounds and splash screens of the startup process. But when Edgy hit the shelves, the artwork was scarcely different from that of its predecessor, Dapper Drake."

The Haiku Project recently introduced a new and more efficient scalable vector-based icon format, the Haiku Vector Icon Format, or HVIF for short. HVIF uses a special vector storage format specifically designed to store icons that is so efficient, that icons in Haiku take a meager 500 - 700 bytes on average. Following the introduction of this new icon format, the Haiku developer behind this new icon format, Stephan Assmus (Stippi), has published two articles, one introducing some interesting facts about HVIF, and another giving some details of why Haiku vector icons are so small.

Monday, Sun did what many pundits, media personalities, developers and IT managers wanted done months ago - it opened up Java so that it could be freely distributed under the General Public License. In this interview with SearchOpenSource.com, Laurie Tolson, the vice president of Java developer products and programs, discussed this milestone for Java and what it meant for Sun, developers, IT managers.

Intel today formally launched its first set of quad-core processors, which officials say should give the chipmaker a comfortable headstart on archrival AMD (AMD quad-core offerings will not be due until the release around mid-2007). A review of one of these quad-cores has also been published.

"The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off its Fall Fundraising Campaign! The success of this effort will have a large impact on our budget for next year. There are many ways that you can help us meet our goal of raising over USD 200000."

One of the things that has been missing on the BeOS platform, either for BeOS, ZETA or Haiku, is pthread, and this was also something that yellowTAB experienced when they were working on a port of OpenOffice. Hence, the development team has released support for phthread. This improvement will be contributed to Haiku as soon as it reaches a more mature state.

"As a network professional, I have used various Linux-based systems for many years in troubleshooting and monitoring networks. However, Linux has never been my operating system of choice for my office desktop. Its limitations in other areas and often cumbersome installation and configuration, simply put, left it as a specialized operating system for specific needs. That is, until now. Red Hat recently released its latest free distribution of Linux, Fedora Core 6. I was so impressed with this release that I have replaced one of my two desktop machines operating systems with it. Here's why you, as a networker, need to seriously look at Fedora Core 6."

"Exchange Server 2007 will be released to manufacturing in December and be available to customers within a number of days after that, Microsoft officials have confirmed. The formal announcement of Exchange 2007's RTM date was made in David Lemson's keynote on November 7 at the Exchange Connections conference."

This article reviews how to modify an SQL query to group related rows together to provide summary statistics database information and introduces the concept of a view, which can be used to simplify database application development by creating a virtual table that represents the results of an SQL query. Also learn about database indexes, which you can use to locate specific table rows. After you've mastered these advanced database concepts, you'll be well positioned to begin developing Java database applications with Apache Derby.

The cat is out of the bag: Java will be released under the GPL. Joshua Marinacci writes: "I think it makes a lot of sense because it protects Sun's interest in preventing forks and also the community's interest in knowing that Java will forever be available in the public sphere. The GPL has always provided an option to fork just in case someone takes the code in a bad direction. Historically having this option available ensures that it never needs to actually be used, letting the community grow and thrive."

After 2 years in development, the Firebird Project today officially releases the much-anticipated version 2.0 of its open source Firebird relational database software during the opening session of the fourth international Firebird Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.