Yes, it's been one busy week here at OSNews. We published a guide on how to build a computer that can run Mac OS X using an unaltered retail disc, and this guide became one of the most often-visited stories in a matter of days. On top of that, we had countless interesting and insightful discussions about Mono and Moonlight, the Linux Unified Kernel, switching to Mac OS X, the future of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and lots of other interesting stuff. Due to me being engulfed in university work, there is - again - no My Take this week. It might take a few weeks before I can get My Take back into the game - my apologies for that.The biggest article of the week was definitely the one I wrote about building a computer that can run Mac OS X in a fully legal way. Using boot-132, which employs an altered open source Darwin kernel to boot a regular, vanilla Mac OS X disc, we were able to build a fully-functional Macintosh for quite a low price. Obviously, it being an dual-core Atom 330 machine, it won't hold a candle to even a current Mac Mini, but what do you expect for the pricetag? The article itself probably broke all popularity records on OSNews, as it skyrocketed into our top ten of most popular articles in a matter of days.
Related to this is the news that Psystar is having financial troubles, and has requested Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to survive. The small company is in a legal conflict with Apple because it sells unauthorised installations of Mac OS X on non-Apple labelled machines. This by no means is the end of the company, but it does signal that it's bleeding money - fast.
We also had a number of "Ask OSNews" stories, an idea presented by David Adams, OSNews' owner. We discussed whether or not Apple will ever release Mail.app for Windows, but more interesting was the discussion about switching to the Mac, and whether it made sense for someone from Hungary. The last Ask OSNews item this week was about the FHS, as a user asked us why the saner GoboLinux filesystem layout isn't being adopted by other distributions. A pretty massive discussion followed, an interesting one at that. Be sue to give it a read.
Another really interesting story this week was about the Linux Unified Kernel project, which aims to implement the Windows NT kernel mechanisms as Linux kernel modules, so that when combined with code from Wine and ReactOS, this new "hybrid" kernel would run Windows and Linux code natively. A long way off, but impressive nonetheless.
We also dove into the Mono and Moonlight conundrum, and thanks to iTWire, we have a better insight into the patent situation regarding these two projects. Despite the fact that the iTWire article made some faulty assumptions that could've been easily checked on the web, it did make it clear that something shady is going on regarding any Microsoft patents covering the Ecma parts of .Net. In addition, Novell says every distribution can ship Moonlight, but Microsoft disagrees. Interesting matter, and the last word definitely hasn't been said here.
We also saw a few releases this week: Windows Vista/Server 2008 SP2, KOffice 2.0.0, and Genode 9.05.
As said, no My Take this week; I hope I'll be able to pick that up as soon as possible.
