Debian has without much fanfare released the beta 3 of Etch, the final release slated to take place sometime this year. This review looks at what Debian has for the Linux enthusiast with its latest offering.

"In this howto we will install 2 bind dns servers, one as the master and the other as a slave server. For security reasons we will chroot bind9 in its own jail. Using two servers for a domain is a commonly used setup and in order to host your own domain you are required to have at least 2 domain servers. If one breaks, the other can continue to serve your domain."

Do you think design patterns are academic nonsense, useless and elitist? If this is how you feel, the aim in this chapter is to show you the opposite, because nothing could be more wrong.

"When OSDL announced the first release of its Portland initiative at LinuxWorld Boston in April, heralding it 'a breakthrough in desktop Linux', I muttered my skepticism to a co-worker. He expressed surprise at my reaction, noting that the initiative employs extremely smart people. I don't doubt their intelligence, or their sincerity, but I wouldn't bet a penny on the project living up to its initial claim, because you can't conjure a silver bullet out of intelligence and sincerity." KDE developer Kevin Krammer replies: "There is an article over at linux.com which predicts that the Portland initiative will fail to reach its goal of 'unifying the Linux desktop'. Unfortunately the author somehow missed that 'unifying the Linux desktop' is not the goal of Portland."

"Can you imagine controlling your computer with a peripheral that resembles a fluffy bar of soap? Well hear us out, because the Soap pointing device from Microsoft Research offers to combine the accuracy of a traditional optical mouse with the freedom of a wireless, even desk-free peripheral." There are even instructions in the video to make one yourself.

The controversial discussion about the important of communications at the Haiku project continues, and seems to be heating up. The project recently announced a new marcom team, and now the team lead (Koki) is coming on strong to the developers. He claims that the new Haiku website now in development "looks awful, is disorganized, and it has no focus whatsoever", and proposes to fix it by organizing it into marketing and development areas managed by each group (plus an open community area). Read on for a short summary written by OSNews reader sogabe.

Apple is already gearing up for a major marketing campaign for the holidays, and if they're able to ramp up demand, and then deliver the system when they say it will be delivered, it could trump Microsoft in a way that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs would crow about for years.

In this final installment on testing of the three part series, Brian Goetz examines another technique for smoking out bugs that violate design rules: aspects. The first two installments in this series, Part 1 covering testing in integrated frameworks and Part 2 on testing with leverage, show how static analysis tools like Find Bugs can provide greater leverage in managing software quality by focusing on entire categories of bugs rather than on specific bug instances.

Red Herring interviews Eric Raymond. "Open-source advocate Eric Raymond on winning over the iPod generation, the need for open source to conquer hearts and minds beyond geekdom, and why Linux advocates don’t have much time to beat Microsoft." Update by ELQ: Raymond shows signs of once more playing a bigger role in open-source circles. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains this change of strategy in DesktopLinux.com as he knows Raymond personally.

Normally we try not to report on music players, but since this concerns Microsoft's direct attack on Apple's music player, it's actually somewhat interesting. "Microsoft's forthcoming Zune player is shooting to be the life of the party, allowing users to create mobile social networks and stream music to nearby friends or strangers, according to a government regulatory filing. A Microsoft representative confirmed that the filing is legitimate and that Toshiba will manufacture the Zune device, but declined to offer additional details or comment on the information in the FCC filing."

"Sysjail is a userland virtualisation system for OSs supporting the systrace library. It runs on OpenBSD, NetBSD and MirOS. The first generation of sysjail is as close to a drop-in replacement for FreeBSD's jail subsystem as reasonably possible. While sysjail currently behaves as a NetBSD/OpenBSD/MirOS implementation of jail, it also provides additonal auditing and resource-limiting utilities."

When Mac sales dropped off in 1985, Bill Gates personally wrote John Sculley suggesting that he license the Macintosh design to companies like Apollo, DEC and Wang, and establish the software as the industry standard. Apple declined, and Microsoft published Windows. Sculley was enraged, and eventually filed suit. After five years, Apple lost, but not before severely damaging its relationship with Microsoft (which accounted for 2/3 of all Mac software sales).

Technologic Systems is offering a freely downloadable, Debian-based Linux OS image said to boot from an SD card in less than two seconds, on the company's ARM9-based SBC (single-board computer). The TS-7300 SBC targets embedded applications requiring "extreme design security, flexibility, and reliability", according to the company.

Linux-Noob has reviewed SLED 10. "Novell's strengths are many, and I'm delighted to see the excellent work they have done in usability tests, and making the whole desktop feel like it's ready, ready to do business, and ready to serve its users. The development they've done with Beagle and in particular the 'computer menu' are fantastic and hopefully are just the start of better things to come."