John Gowin writes “When the KDE and GNOME environments first hit the scene, they were realitive unknowns, who found a following among the early adopters. As the software matured, their following grew, until they became so popular, that they began to get support from the industry giants (a la the GNOME Foundation, and the KDE League). Now the dynamic duo are the default environments of the Linux desktop.

With the release of KDE 2.0 the bar has been moved higher, and GNOME is not sitting on it’s hands. GNOME’s new graphical shell, Eazel 1.0 is due out very soon, and Ximain (formerly Helixcode) is releasing Evolution and Red Carpet to the huddled masses in the very near future. It’s going to rock to use GNOME this year. KDE has already released KDE 2.1, which is more of an internal upgrade than anything else, and are already planning their next big move. It’s going to rock to use KDE this year, too.

Helping KDE grow into a business desktop environment has been one company’s (or should I say Kompany’s?) mission from the word go. That, of course, is theKompany.com. I recently had the pleasure of conducting a brief interview with Shawn Gordon, head of theKompany.com, to get his feel on the future of the Linux desktop.

From LinuxOrbit.com.“

What does TV have to offer technically oriented people? Salon reviews 3 shows targetted at geeks: ‘The Lone Gunmen,’ ‘BattleBots,’ and ‘Junkyard Wars.’

“Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Through the years, Microsoft’s rivals have
accused the company of using FUD as a way to stifle competition. Now,
ironically, those same tactics are being turned against the Redmond giant. Its
reported plans to require “activation” of Windows XP as an antipiracy tactic
have TechRepublic members up in arms, as evidenced by the response to my
most recent Microsoft Challenge and another, similar discussion elsewhere on
TechRepublic’s boards.” From TechRepublic, obviously.

“What company wouldn’t kill for an application that does everything Exchange can do, only better, faster, and cheaper?
Nicholas Petreley tells us the answer is Hewlett-Packard and explains why HP won’t sell OpenMail to anyone who can
actually use it, or release the code as open source.” More at LinuxWorld.com.

IBM Developerworks looks over the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s release of SE Linux, the government intelligence agency’s security-optimised Linux kernel, released complete with source and summaries of what has been changed and why.

“Right now I’m mainly working on the Konqueror HTML engine of KDE 2.x, its a very interesting and
challenging work so I spent most of my time on this.
In general I like improving KDE overall, fixing performance and usability issues or bugs. I try to keep an eye
on the development and take a look at whatever is interesting me at the moment. Especially I like working on
the nasty little details that make things perfect, hence my addiction to KHTML.” Read more about Dirk at KDE.org.

ZDNet reports that Philips will be showcasing rewritable DVD discs at the Cebit IT show later this month.

Star Tribune erports that Cisco has added its name to the list of tech corporations cutting staff. The networking equipment maker is cutting 5000 full time and 3000 part time and contract positions.

BSD Today reports on Ogg Vorbis, a relatively new music compression system in the works. From the article “This article shares my experiences with building an Ogg Vorbis player, converting MP3s to Ogg Vorbis format, and then creating audio files from my music CDs. “The technology is patent-free, the code is open source, plugins for various popular audio players are available, and now the library code has been changed to use the BSD license.””

ZDNet reports that Compaq’s latest generation of its iPaq handheld system has 64M of RAM and two PC card slots.