The Ubuntu team has released the 2nd alpha release en route to Edgy Eft. "The primary changes from Knot 1 have been implementations of feature goals as listed on this page. Common to all variants, we have upgraded Xorg to the 7.1 release. In Ubuntu, GNOME has been updated to 2.16.0 Release Candidate 1. Other notable changes are listed on here. KDE has been updated to 3.5.4. Other notable Kubuntu changes are listed on here."

Apple on Thursday evening offered developers testing its next-generation Leopard operating system the first update to the software since it was released privately last month. "This Software Update delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X Leopard Developer Preview and is recommended for all users," Apple said of the update, distributed over Leopard's Mac OS X Software Update mechanism.

Yesterday we reported on the transcript of an interview with Stallman at the GPLv3 conference; today, FSF-Europe has posted the transcript to Stallman's actual presentation, including audio and video material. Yes, yesterday's item had the wrong title, in case you're wondering (it said transcript of RMS' talk, instead of 'just' an interview); it is fixed now.

Another review of Gentoo 2006.1. In one respect, Gentoo Linux 2006.1 is the same as it's always been, except with newer software on the installation media. Beginning with version 2006.0, though, a graphical environment was added to the live CD along with an installation program that rarely worked properly. The good news is, the installer works reasonably well in Gentoo 2006.1; the bad news is, it's still quicker and easier to install by hand via the command line.

"Twilight is an imperative, object oriented, general purpose programming language. The guiding principles of Twilight are simplicity, practicality, and orthogonality. It is a language which is easy to learn and to be productive in. An experienced programmer in Python, Java, C# or C++ will be able to pick up Twilight in a short period of time."

This free interoperability demo introduces users to the simplicity with which the newly converged WS-RT and WS-RP specifications and existent OASIS specification standards will be able to interoperate with each other. It includes an online demonstration hosted on alphaWorks with an AJAX Web service client, a tool for interoperability testing, which sends SOAP messages to a WS-RT/WS-RP Web service.

It's that time of the year again. "If 'a year of GNU/Linux on the desktop' is defined as a year when GNU/Linux has finally started its steady encroachment to the desktop then 2006 is the year. A lot of users have started using GNU/Linux on their desktops long before, but it is 2006 which marked the two probably biggest GNU/Linux desktop releases to date, Ubuntu Dapper and Novell SuSE 10. It is 2006 which marks the biggest opportunity for GNU/Linux to steal the desktop market share from Windows due to the bad reputation behind the pending Windows Vista release. And the eyes and focus of both the GNU/Linux community and major GNU/Linux corporations such as Novell are fixed on that opportunity. Novell marketing is true: 'Your Linux is ready'."

PPCNUX-Team member Arno found a source that posts prices of the PowerPC970 (G5) CPUs. They conclude that that could not be the reason that there's no Apple machines running on PowerPC anymore. "G5 Quads for everbody! Thanks to IBM's pricing policy, the open-armed Power.org community, and Genesi's sustained commitment to the Power Architecture this could become a truely realistic option in the not-so-far future..."