PC World reports that IBM may bow out of the desktop market, an area of computer hardware with stagnant sales that Big Blue CEO Louis Gerstner has called “not terribly strategic.” With just 6 percent of the PC market and first-quarter losses of $58 million in its personal-systems division, the company may give up on this particular segment of the computer hardware market.

If you’ve been searching for a way to anti-alias fonts in GTK+ 1.2, you’ve found what you were looking for. As this item at GNOME Gnotices reveals, there’s now a handy patch available to enable anti-aliased fonts using the Xrender extension. Or perhaps not — one user mentios that at least two other developers have tried their hand at such a patch, and each time they’ve broken various bits and bytes essential to the system.

From Reuters (via ZDNet) at Taipei’s Computex 2001 trade show: “Microchip maker Intel said Monday it would offer its
first chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor to allow customers to use
alternatives to fast but pricey Rambus memory chips.”

ZDNet interviews George Paolini, Sun’s departing v.p. of Java community development. After eight and a half years at Sun (“It’s been a great run”), Paolini is leaving the company to join up with former boss Alan Baratz at Zaplet.com. Paolini sees a bright future for Java — a good thing, since his new employer is in the Java development business — counting NTT DoCoMo’s adoption of Sun’s Java 2 Micro edition among his successes.

The People Behind KDE series continues, this time with a profile of self-proclaimed “Enthusiastic KDE User” Navindra Umanee. Faithful readers of KDE Development News and KDE Dot News will know Umanee from involvement with those efforts.

ZDNet has an overview of the JavaOne trade show taking place this week, in the subterranean caverns of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Expect plenty of new products and announcements from a range of companies including BEA, IBM, Oracle, Nokia, Borland, and of course, Sun.

Overclockers Australia takes a look at Tyan’s “Thunder” dual-socket motherboard. In addition to the handy technical information, opinion, and all-important benchmarks, the review includes plenty of up close and person pictures of this new hardware.

Highlights from this week’s edition include making Tcl work better with 64-bit integers, how to build TclPro from source, and creative tips for mucking about in directories. Now online at Linux Weekly News.

Newsweek (via MSNBC) has an item on LinuxWorld Japan. The article gives a bit of background on the state of Linux in Japan, but mainly focuses on a presentation given by Slashdot’s Hemos and CmdrTaco and the launch of a Japanese version of that site. Slashdot and Newsforge are owned by OSDN, a subsidiary of VA Linux.

The latest edition of news and links of interest to the Python developer community is now online at Linux Weekly News. Items in this edition includes coverage of DISLIN 7.5, generating graphics with Piddle, news of PYUI — a user interface library that’s 100% Python, and an answer to that burning question: How do you serial IO in Python?