Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens has escalated to new heights the debate over whether the open-source Xen virtualization technology is ready for prime time, saying Novell was being irresponsible and risked damaging enterprises' first experiences with Xen. My Take: So "irresponsible" is synonymous to "being truthful"?

DirectX10 is not just another version of DirectX. This version has been re-built from the ground up to change the way applications think about material management and load balancing between the CPU and GPU. D3D10, as also DirectX10 is called, takes advantage of the improved communication between the CPU and GPU and efficiently manages the data transfer between them. Screenshots included.

Apple released version 1.1 beta of its Boot Camp software that allows Apple users to run MacOS X side by side with Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. The 202 MB download adds support for newly released Intel-Macs, simplified partitioning, the ability to install Windows XP on any internal disk, support for the Isight camera and built-in microphones, as well as improved Apple keyboard support. Apple says that users should create a new Macintosh Drivers for Windows CD and install the updated software it contains on Windows XP. According to Apple, this will not require the user having to reinstall Windows XP or Mac OS X. Elsewhere, Apple is preparing for the new Xserver cluster node.

OpenSolaris isn't a true open-source project, but rather a "facade," because Sun Microsystems doesn't share control of it with outsiders, executives from rival IBM say.

It is a common belief that Ubuntu provides newer software than Debian. This is of course true when Ubuntu is compared to Debian stable. This is also true for specific software packages, like Gnome. But how does it compare in general? Also, the Debian Installer team has released the third beta of its installer for Etch, the next version of Debian. According to the announcement, there is now an optional graphical installer for the i386 and amd64 platforms, and you can now set up encrypted partitions during installation. Not all features are present yet in this beta release and those that are may not be stable.

The new "Linux-enabled" Lenovo laptop launched this week at LinuxWorld will not actually come "pre-loaded" with Novell SUSE Linux, a high-ranking Lenovo official said today, contradicting some industry reports stating otherwise.

For Mac geeks of a certain persuasion, the first mention of a soon-to-be-revealed feature of Leopard during the WWDC keynote set off a mental chain-reaction. That feature was Time Machine, and the name alone was enough to cause one particular phrase to hammer in the mind of many people, including me: "New file system in Leopard!" It was even a bingo square. In fact, it was my personal favorite bingo square, and the one that I most looked forward to marking.

Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta 2 version "Odin" has been released: It comes with GNOME 2.16 beta 2, Kernel 2.6.17 (based on 2.6.17.8, with ALSA 1.0.12 rc2, i965 support, and new kernel factorization: normal, enterprise and legacy). KDE 3.5.4, more applications migrated to XDG menus, new 'Ia Ora' Mandriva Theme (only included in GNOME for now) and a new VPN configuration tool (drakvpn).

Trolltech's Zack Rusin today introduced Glucose on Freedesktop Xorg mailing list. Glucose is a new "OpenGL based acceleration architecture" that "uses XGL code". It does not require any change on the drivers side, except a call to glucoseDriverInit.

"Linspire Inc. claims that the recently released Freespire is the development version of Linspire, much like Fedora Core is the freely available development version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. During the several days that I used it, I found this to be true in both a good and a bad way. It's good in the sense that the software that comprises Freespire is a bit more modern, but bad in that it has a few problems that make it unsuitable for a production release." Read more at TheJemReport.

The new and re-written version of Glade has taken the streets. Glade 3.0 Requires GTK+ 2.8 and libxml2, Glade 3.0 will expose properties, signals and widgets from GTK+ 2.8, but it has deprecated support for custom widgets. Update: Glade 3 is featured on the latest Gnomejournal.

RealNetworks will release open-source software this year that will let Linux computers play Windows Media files legally. The media delivery software company and Novell made the announcement at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Novell said it will include the tool in its Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in the fourth quarter.

Lenovo debuted its first Linux-based laptops at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday, running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 provided through a partnership with Novell. The systems are the result of a two-year research effort by the two companies as well as Intel, whose Centrino Duo processors power the portable. The Thinkpad T60p is an inch thin and weighs 4.7 pounds. Several features of Lenovo's Windows-based notebooks, including Help Center support, the ThinkPad Configuration Utility, Power Manager and Access Connections have been ported to Linux, the company said.

AMD plans to announce its new 'Rev F' generation of Opteron server processors Tuesday, the next volley in a competition with Intel's newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD's new 'Socket F'. Although that new socket disrupts server designers' easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade.