I downloaded a few VMware images for use in VMware player. The mouse (a PS/2 type) did not work either in ReactOS or in Syllable, but did work in PC-BSD (all in VMware Player). Later, I downloaded the install-cd iso of ReactOS and burned it to a CD. The image is a tiny download (19MB uncompressed), so it didn't take long. I intended to install ReactOS on a laptop and desktop.

"Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. "Firefox 2 Beta 2 is intended for Web application developers and our testing community," the team said on the Mozilla development website. "Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly."

"Since we released Geekbench 2006 on July 10th, we've received over 4800 Geekbench results; over half of those results are from computers running Mac OS X. I took a look at the results, and found that we've received results for almost every computer model Apple's shipped in the past six years, from the iMac G3 to the Mac Pro. Since we love us some benchmarks here at Geek Patrol, I thought it'd be interesting to put together an overview of Mac performance over the past six years."

The 4th international GPLv3 conference is being held at Bangalore and Richard Stallman is one of the prominent delegates. This is a transcript of the interview with RMS where he is asked a couple of questions related to GPLv3 and free software in general.

A new version of Mono has been released, and it contains many significant updates and bug fixes. " The Mono Basic compiler and the Basic runtime have been removed from the Mono distribution. A new compiler that is compatible with Visual Basic 2005 and a matching runtime are now part of a separate distribution. On this particular release, we are offering the basic runtime, but the compiler is not able to run completely on Mono yet."

Google has announced the release of the source of an old OCR software called Tesseract in source. "In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing."

Hi-Mobile.net once again kindly stepped up and sent us in the next-generation Motorola Linux-based ROKR-E2 feature phone. In the tradition of the ROKR devices, the E2 is also built around the idea of music on the go, while it's the first Linux phone to have an initial retail cost smaller than $256. Read inside for our detailed review, video and pictures.

Charles Hannum, co-founder of NetBSD posted to 3 major BSD lists saying that "The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation."

This article addresses the most commonly encountered scenarios and errors while porting Fortran or any UNIX or Linux-based applications on different systems. Discover how to port Fortran-based High Performance Computing applications, such as computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling, weather modeling, and linear algebra packages, using IBM XL compilers and gnu compilers on large clusters.

"Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to Apple's board of directors at their meeting today. Eric also sits on Google's board of directors and Princeton University's board of trustees. "Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple's board of directors," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric's insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead."

Starting today, Linspire does not only offer a free OS, but also its CNR Basic service. " Linspire, Inc., developer of the commercial desktop Linux operating system of the same name and Freespire, the free community desktop Linux operating system, announced the immediate change in pricing for its popular CNR Service from an annual subscription fee based offering to a completely free service." CEO Carmony said: "We're thrilled to now be in a position to offer this excellent service to desktop Linux users absolutely free. CNR really makes using desktop Linux easy, and we want everyone to have access to this quality service."

"The GNU General Public License is one of the most widely used software licenses - and, undoubtedly, the most misunderstood. Some of this misunderstanding comes from hostile propaganda, but some also comes from a lack of experience in licensing issues on the part of both lawyers and lay users, and the use of standard language in conventional end-user license agreements that are unthinkingly coupled with the GPL. In all cases, the confusion is frequently based on misreadings, rumors, secondhand accounts, and what is convenient to believe."

"The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new DVD ISO Re-Spins of Fedora Core 5 (as well as the live CD). These Re-Spin ISOs are based upon Fedora Core 5 and all updates released as of August 18th, 2006. The ISO images are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent starting Monday, August 28th, 2006."

"NetBSD runs on more hardware platforms than any other UNIX derivative due to smart design decisions and a commitment to portable code. Whether you're porting an operating system to a proprietary embedded system or looking for stability and compatibility across hardware platforms in the lab, NetBSD and its open license is a compelling alternative to Linux and the GNU Public License."