Kare Sjolander announces a release of the Snack Sound Toolkit v2.1b1, a Tcl and Python toolkit that adds commands to play, record, and process sound and supports in-memory sound objects, file based audio, and streaming audio. Most notable in this new version: support for Ogg/Vorbis.

Stormix has confirmed that it has, indeed, laid off all its employees due to an inability to secure funding and is currently in "hibernation mode." The company will no longer be providing support for its products.

Turbolinux Inc has announced the worldwide release of Turbolinux Server (TLS) 6.5. An enterprise level platform, it is meant to simplify global deployment by supporting five languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (traditional and simplified). TLS 6.5 will also enhance deployment with the introduction of a multi-language mass installation tool.

Based on the current efforts in Latin America to adopt Linux in schools and government, and the penalties for illegal use of proprietary software, the outlook for its spread is bright. Considering cost alone, by using Linux, Latin American nations will be able to provide their citizens with significantly more computers than would be possible with proprietary products. This will impact open source development efforts, as Latin American developers increasingly turn to Linux.

Joseph Mallett writes "xMach today announces our brand new Core Team. We've also (finally) added a CVS server, as well as

a CVSweb front-end so people can browse the source. Since the first Slashdot post, we've accomplished one of our major

goals of being GPL-free (and thus fully BSD License'd), as well as added two mailing lists and fixed the wishlist code. Due to

Mach's history with Multiprocessing, we are currently looking more and more and the ideas of distributed processing. The code

Joseph Mallett writes "We've now removed most (all?) of the GPL code.

Also, we've integrated the RTMach Lites code, for better

application-level compat with modern operating systems.

We've got a few individuals working on porting either

FreeBSD or OpenBSD device driver frameworks to xMach

so that our native drivers (as the Linux ones are gone) will

be wider and varying than the (extremely) limited Mach

drivers that we currently have. We're also removing all

code not pertinent to Mach4 (i.e. OSFMACH and Mach3)

as part of our new 'slogan'(?): Proactively Unbloated.

Working with IBM, SCO and Caldera release a preview of AIL 5L, a 64-bit UNIX OS for Intel Itanium processors that can run Linux applications. For the technology preview release only of AIX 5L, licenses will be free of charge and will not include support. Pricing and support for future releases will be determined at the time of each such release.

IBM Corp will take aim at Sun Microsystems Inc. with the launch of two new midrange servers -- the deskside p620 and rack-mounted p660 -- as part of its overall strategy to catch up to Sun, which leads the U.S. in UNIX server market share. It also will open up things a bit in the UNIX market by introducing its AIX 5L, which is primed for Linux, in an effort to gain an edge over the closed systems of its competitors.

PyQt v2.4 (the Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform GUI toolkit)has been released and new features include added support for Qt v2.3.0 and Python v2.1, the Qt v2.3.0 QFontDatabase.isFixedPitch() class method, the Qt v2.3.0 QToolBar.styleChange() class method, the Qt v2.3.0 QScrollView.AutoOneFit enum value, the Qt v2.3.0 QInterlaceStyle class and many more.

According to Ted Ts'o, Linux kernel developer and principal engineer at VA Linux Systems, the next version of the Linux kernel, kernel 2.5 is due sometime in mid-to-late 2002, and will offer improved support for enterprise, mobile and Internet use.