A spike in PC demand has created a new shortage of Intel chipsets, potentially reviving an issue blamed for causing the company to lose market share to rival AMD last year. Demand for new PCs spiked after the two microprocessor makers slashed prices for desktop chips in late July, but the sharp rise in purchases has caused component makers to scramble to keep up, said Sunny Han, director of marketing at Asustek, the world's largest motherboard maker.

Novell is still working on improving the VBA support of its OpenOffice submission, and is therefore open to all sumbmissions of VBA macros which are not working on the OOo version of SLED 10. In the meantime the question is when - or even if - Sun will accept the patches for OpenOffice to get VBA support.

OSWeekly compares Opera 8.0 to Pocket IE. "Pocket IE is suitable for casual browsers who seldom use their mobile devices for serious surfing. The innovative features of Opera bring it very close to its desktop counterpart. If all you do is check mails and that too seldom, we would recommend Pocket IE. If you are that tech-savvy person who would not settle for anything but the best, we would hands down recommend Opera as the mobile browser of choice."

David Beers was in attendance at LinuxWorld San Francisco where PalmSource was exhibiting the Access Linux Platform. PalmSource also held a full day of hands-on tutorials in which they built and debugged native applications for mobile Linux. In this article David brings us up to date on ALP, its progress and other details on and what was being presented about ALP at LinuxWorld.

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.

New Iyonix computers are shipping with Nvidia FX52 series graphics cards and RISC OS 5.12 fitted as standard. The FX5200 and FX5500 cards are newer than the dinosaur Nvidia GeForce MX 2 that shipped with original Iyonixes, plus they feature dual-head and DVI output capabilities. RISC OS support for these two functions is understood to not yet be fully complete, however. The new cards are also mildly faster than the MX 2 devices, speeding up graphics operations by an estimated 25 to 30 percent.

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.

Patrick Volkerding, Slackware's benevolent dictator for life, has 'released' Slackware Linux 11.0 Release Candidate 2. From the changelog: "This is mostly frozen now unless bugs (or irresistible upgrades) come up, so I'll call this update Slackware 11.0 release candidate 2."

"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.

"In the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about Xgl, compiz, AIGLX et cetera. It seems that 'Xgl' has become a synonym for fancy desktop on Linux - but no one seems to talk about the alternatives or how it all works. I have had a little look into this and am going to summarize it for y'all. I will explain where the following come from and how they work: Xglx, Xegl, Luminocity, and AIGLX."

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.

MSDN's Channel 9 has two videos in their 'Going Deep' series which dive, well, deeper into Singularity, the operating system in development at Microsoft's research department. The first of the two is about, among other things, Software Isolated Processes (SIPs). The second of the two actually shows Singularity in action.

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.

IronPython is the code name of the new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET and Mono. The latest version, 1.0-RC2 was just released. Changelog here.