If open source were a religion, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who wrote the core of the operating system that would become Linux, would be its prophet. In 1991, Mr Torvalds created the kernel, or core software, that would eventually be adopted by millions of computer users and lay the foundation for a vibrant open-source community. In an email interview with Red Herring, Mr Torvalds says the increasing focus of venture capitalists and large companies on open source can only be good for a community that, until now, was on the fringes of the commercial realm.

ThinkSecret has put together an overview of the new features as found in the WWDC preview of Mac OS 10.5, including a screenshot gallery. "From an end-user's perspective, the build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that developers received at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference nearly two weeks ago may seem lacking of new features. Beyond Spaces and Time Machine, like Spotlight and Dashboard in Tiger before it, or Expose and Fast User Switching in Panther, the span of noticeable new features are limited in present form." On a related note, Jobs will not hold a keynote speech at the Paris Apple Expo.

How is data sent from a Windows Communication Foundation client to a service? This chapter explains the involvement of XML serializers to improve control and optimization.

Learn all the functional and technical details you need to design your clustering solution for Linux and NetWare. Sander van Vugt and Rob Bastiaansen cover the key topics and also provide practical tips on setting up clustering for applications that do not require shared storage.

"A common task for System Administrators is to monitor and care for a server. That's fairly easy to do at a moment's notice, but how to keep a record of this information over time? One way to monitor your server is to use the Sysstat package. Sysstat is actually a collection of utilities designed to collect information about the performance of a linux installation, and record them over time. It's fairly easy to install too, since it is included as a package on many distributions."

"If we want open source software to take off on the desktop, we need to reduce the amount of choice and concentrate our efforts into a single app for each purpose. Choice is one of the drawcards of open source software, but if it is ever to receive adoption at any recognisable level on the desktop, there needs to be less of it. More is less and less is more." More here.

Ubuntu bug hunters and users in general have discovered a severe bug in the Debian-derived distribution. The bug is rated as 'critical', and is said to prevent Ubuntu from gaining any significant ground in the computing world. This bug can be observed everywhere in the world, at companies, in shops, in people's homes. It's Ubuntu's bug #1.

Newly published data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show that Apple leads other personal computer manufacturers, beating out Dell, HP and others. On a 100 point scale, Apple merited a score of 83, according to the ACSI, a 2.5 percent year-over-year increase and a 7.8 percent increase from 1995, the first year the ACSI measured the PC industry. The annual ACSI is sponsored by the American Society for Quality and University of Michigan's M. Ross School of Business. It's derived from phone interviews with customers contacted by using digital-dial telephone samples. More than 70000 consumers are identified and interviewed annually.

You would have thought, in view of the week's events, that Michael Dell would show up at a greet-the-folks gathering here Friday looking like some whiter shade of pale. Not a bit: Appearing in a packed hotel ballroom during a brief stopover, the founder and chairman of the computer maker Dell seemed to glow a sort of sun-drenched pink as he defended his company and his actions. "There are a number of things a company might do in this situation - run and hide, wait for the regulators or claim it's not a problem," Dell told an audience convened by the local chamber of commerce. "We've exercised an abundance of caution. Beyond all the hysteria, we're doing the right thing for our customers, and they'll appreciate it in the long run."

After pushing the launch of Windows Vista to late 2006 for corporate customers and early 2007 for consumers, Microsoft insisted that quality, not timing, would dictate the product's release schedule. The company's loyalty to that guiding principle is soon going to be put to the test.

"The DS Browser ends up becoming a bullet point for the Nintendo DS system's capabilities. Yes, the Nintendo DS can now surf the internet. But after the novelty wears off, you probably won't want to", Craig Harris writes in his review. Craig was very kind to send us a DS screenshot rendering the mobile version of OSNews, although the browser seems to interpret "100%" of cell width as 800px wide instead of DS' 256px native resolution. Update: Craig sent us another shot, this time using the "small screen rendering" mode, which looked much better.

KDE has released a development snapshot of KDE 4, ironically named "Krash". Nothing much to see for users, but should help kickstart porting and development.

"It's a question that crops up with depressing regularity: Why don't Linux filesystems need to be defragmented?. Here's my attempt at answering once and for all. Rather than simply stumble through lots of dry technical explanations, I'm opting to consider that an ASCII picture is worth a thousand words." Read the explanatin here. Elsewhere, "Why is Linux Successful?"

LinuxForums has a review of Freespire 1.0 (screenshots): "I was very pleased and impressed by the quality of this distribution. It is a pity that Freespire isn't completely "free" though, as you have to pay to use its preferred package manager. I really liked the fact that the distribution released an OSS version which didn't include the proprietary and restricted pieces of software. This should help Freespire in getting a better reputation among Linux users. Freespire is a nice distribution with a lot of handy tools and great ideas. It is comfortable and easy to use. In its non-OSS version it comes pre-installed with Java, flash plugins, multimedia support and even spell checkers within its web and email applications."