Google was set to launch late on Wednesday a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop.

Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline.

Google Desktop for Linux was written natively and uses Google’s own desktop search algorithms, not existing Linux search applications such as Beagle, a company representative said. Only computers with x86 processors can use the software. It supports the Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, Novell Suse 10.1 and Red Flag 5 versions of Linux, and uses either the KDE and GNOME graphical user interfaces.

The core framework of the Eclipse programming tools project and 20 of its packages will be overhauled Friday in a massive synchronized release called Europa.

Europa, with 17 million lines of code, is significantly larger than last year’s Callisto release, which had 10 projects and 7 million lines of code, said Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation’s executive director.

Milinkovich is happy that the project still met its end-of-June deadline, the fourth time it’s done so. “One of the key values of the Eclipse development community is predictability,” he said, because many commercial and noncommercial projects rely on the tools. Next year’s project is likely to be called Ganymede, following the Jupiter-moon naming pattern.

Eclipse includes not just programming tools and “runtime” software libraries that accompany running software produced with Eclipse, but also modules for producing software that runs on everything from PCs and servers to embedded computing devices and Web browsers.

Israeli researchers have created a topographical map of the Internet by enlisting more than 5,600 volunteers across 97 countries who agreed to download a program that tracks how Internet nodes interact with each other.

The result is “the most complete picture of the Internet available today,” Bar Ilan University researcher Shai Carmi told the MIT Technology Review.

“A better understanding of the Internet’s structure is vital for integration of voice, data and video streams, point-to-point and point-to-many distribution of information, and assembling and searching all of the world’s information,” Carmi and fellow researchers state in a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It may reveal evolutionary processes that control the growth of the Internet.”

Carmi’s research uses a program called the DIMES agent, which is downloaded onto volunteers’ computers and performs Internet measurements such as traceroute and ping. The project’s Web site promises volunteers that, along with providing a “good feeling,” using the DIMES agent will provide maps to users showing how the Internet looks from their homes

Microsoft Corp. introduced two new online services to its Windows Live line-up on Tuesday and said it plans to release more Web offerings this year to beef up its Internet strategy.

Microsoft plans to take on Web competitors Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. with its “software plus services” strategy, that aims to leverage its dominant market position for software running on the computer to a new suite of services delivered over the Internet.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a new version of the photo application found on Microsoft’s two most recent operating systems, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It simplifies how people can share photos on their Windows Live Spaces site, Microsoft’s social networking platform.

The sharing feature of Microsoft’s new Photo Gallery is similar to how users can publish pictures from Apple Inc.’s iPhoto application to the company’s .Mac online service.

Windows Live Folders will provide up to 500 megabytes of online storage in the United States in a limited test release. Microsoft said it will gauge usage during the test release and possibly add more capacity if needed.

Microsoft sees Windows Live Folders as a way people can share documents, but not necessarily a place where users can back up all the files on a computer hard drive.