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Wine 1.0-rc1 was released today, Wine is a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs, one effect of which will be to limit the hardware capabilities of this type of device, IDG News Service has learned. Microsoft plans to offer PC makers steep discounts on Windows XP Home Edition to encourage them to use that OS instead of Linux on ultra low-cost PCs (ULPCs). To be eligible, however, the PC vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs.

Run external programs from within the development environment and save settings for how you call an external program with launch configuration in Eclipse Europa. In this tutorial, learn how to build and use these launch configurations such as Ant build scripts and an example script to view parameter values. Also learn to use automatic parameters with your external tools.

I don't follow Sun or OpenSolaris all that closely, although I have tried Project Indiana, been intrigued by a "Damn Small" take on OpenSolaris, and generally think that Sun is doing all the right things to survive and thrive in the post-proprietary world. I still want an old Sun SPARCstation, but I can't seem to get that hooked up ... but be that as it may, OpenSolaris -- the open-source, community-fueled version of Sun's Unix-like Solaris operating system -- has been officially launched.

I have to disclose that I have never been a real fan of Ubuntu. I've tried it about every release and had more than my share of issues with it. Ubuntu 8.04 was released last month, and the first reviews mostly spoke of how nice this version was, so I downloaded the i386 version to test. Sigh -- it's rough when you have to change a long-standing opinion.

Learn how Team Integrator for Eclipse-Based Tools enables collaboration between developers using different tools. This package provides team integration for business process management, an exemplar implementation of the package, and projects built using WebSphere Business Modeler and Websphere Integration Developer.

After a few instances where the keyboard and mouse locked up in Ubuntu 8.04 on the $0 Laptop, I decided to write my weekly column for the Daily News' Tech Talk space entirely in Ubuntu. I've got about 10 Firefox windows open, I'm switching between them madly, doing searches, writing and generally beating the hell out of the keyboard and touchpad (I didn't connect the USB mouse today). No crashes, no freezes. Nothing but trouble-free computing.

There was clearly a transaction of money made by Microsoft in Norway, which passed it on to ISO. Good catch. Watch the picture inside this page and recall our old entry about soft briberies.

BIOSLEVEL.com reviews Sapphire's take on AMD's new 780G chipset. The board proves to be surprisingly powerful in Linux, particularly the onboard ATI graphics.

While some people will want to use the ASUS Eee PC for work, a little entertainment never hurts, and that includes games. These tips are designed for people new to Linux, with Xandros the default operating system found on many 2 GB and 4 GB models. Read on for how to add games to the ASUS Eee PC.

Man pages are excellent resources for learning the specifics of a Linux command. After all, who can remember all the nitty gritty of a command? One annoyance of reading man pages on some Linux distributions is that after you quit reading it, the contents are cleared off screen. The man page contents simply don't stay around after you quit man. If that happens to you, it means that the default pager for viewing man pages is the less command.

What's the next best thing for Linux users who can't attend an open source community conference in person? Online workshops like last week's Ubuntu Open Week, where upwards of 300 participants per session showed up to learn more about the popular Linux distribution, the community, and its teams. Organizers presented more than 40 events in a dedicated IRC channel over the course of six days. Session leaders spoke to the group in the "Ubuntu classroom" while a second channel was devoted to collecting questions from the group. This kept the learning channel free of chatter and allowed the speaker to proceed without interruption.

There are few people who would deny that autoconf, automake and libtool have revolutionized the free software world. While there are many thousands of Autotools advocates, some developers absolutely hate the Autotools, with a passion. Why? Let me try to explain with an analogy.

In our article earlier this week looking at the status of X.Org 7.4, one of the features originally planned for integration in this X Server release was MPX, or Multi-Pointer X. While it's been in development for over two years and has been at an experimental state, it's been featured in popular YouTube videos as this is the technology on Linux that allows multiple keyboards and mice to be attached to a single system and MPX allows these input devices to function independently on the same windowing system. For those of you interested in this desktop technology, it's been announced that MPX will finally be merged into the mainline X.Org tree later this month.

Todd Fast, chief architect in Sun Microsystems' Java Enterprise tools group, took a big gulp of Web 2.0 Kool-Aid at JavaOne while telling professional developers they must embrace a broader definition of "application" if they are to take advantage of the current sea change in the way software is built and delivered. Fast told a packed session - Applications for the masses by the masses: why engineers are an endangered species - the application development model is changing, opening up to a broader audience, thanks to new tools and platforms that support non-engineers, or "casual developers."

In this opening salvo, I will reprise the technical terms and history of DRM and thereafter I will try to keep you abreast of the issues for computer users in general and free software in particular. Hopefully, I will in fact be chronicling the death throws of DRM. Read more at the FSM website.

For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development. A few months ago, Gilbert Ashley, the author of src2pkg (Slackware's "magic package maker") invited me and two other people to help him manage the user documentation for his program. The process we used to create the src2pkg wiki may be a useful example for other free and open source software (FOSS) application developers.

A new release of Sun's xVM VirtualBox provides Macintosh users with a fresh virtual machine option, and delivers improvements for other host operating systems. Available for various Linux distributions including Debian, Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu as well as Solaris, Mac OS X on Intel and Windows, xVM VirtualBox allows "practically any x86 based OS" to run as a guest. The main exception is Mac OS X, but Apple's licence only permits Mac OS X Server to be used as a guest operating system (not the regular desktop version), and even then only when the host operating system is Mac OS X Server and the hardware is Apple-labeled.

This document describes how to set up and use Sabayon on Fedora 8. Taken from the Sabayon page: "Sabayon is a system administration tool to manage GNOME desktop settings. Sabayon provides a sane way to edit GConf defaults and GConf mandatory keys: the same way you edit your desktop. Sabayon launches profiles in an Xnest window. Any changes you make in the Xnest window are saved back to the profile file, which can then be applied to user's accounts."

Sun Microsystems has backtracked on previous plans to release important backup features for its MySQL database under a proprietary license, following widespread criticism from the open source community. "MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source," said Kaj Arno, MySQL's vice president of community relations, in a statement released on his Web site on Wednedsday. "So will the MySQL Connectors, and so will the main storage engines we ship."