The JNode team has released version 0.2.3 of the JNode operating system. JNode is an open source operating system written completely in Java (with a very small assembler nano-kernel). New features and improvements in this release are many classpath patches, improvements in AWT, Swing and desktop support, various bugfixes in the JIT compiler, ISO9660 support, better support for testing JNode with Mauve (mauve plugins, invoker commands), and more. Screenshots are available.

GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, version 4.1 has been released. The list of changes details the improvements. The Fedora team has already incorporated it and Fedora Core 5 will have 4.1 as the system compiler with GCC 3.2 provided as an alternative for compatibility reasons.

The first release candidate for GNOME 2.14 is out. This is the last GNOME unstable release before the big .0 release. Lots of new features and bug fixes have been added during this cycle; Davyd's 'Look at GNOME 2.14' tells you which. Download the platform, desktop, admin and bindings sources.

ActiveWin reviews the latest Windows Vista build, and concludes: "Microsoft is going in the right direction. They are thinking through the user experience, they understand what users want, they know that deployment is important; security, management, reliability: all those things are important, but they need to be easier to use and manage and that is the aim of Vista, to make it all easier."

"As a Linux user, there are times when you have to play nicely with users of Windows or Mac OS - such as when they send you Microsoft Word files. When you receive a Word file, you can either follow Richard Stallman's advice and refuse it, or bite the bullet and work with it. Modern Linux word processors - such as OpenOffice.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, and TextMaker - can deal with most Word files. But if you don't want to fire up a word processor in order to read or print the document, you can turn to the command line. A handful of small but powerful Linux command line utilities make viewing, printing, and even converting Word files to another format, a breeze."

Geekpatrol benchmarks Rosetta performance, and concludes: "I'm impressed with Rosetta; Geekbench performance running under Rosetta is 40% to 80% of what it is running natively. Plus, running Geekbench under Rosetta is comparable to running Geekbench natively on a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz (our baseline system), at least in the single-threaded tests."

Ultimate++ 602 has been released. Ultimate++ is a C++ platform. U++ competes with popular scripting languages while preserving C/C++ runtime characteristics. New features of the 602 release include a new report package, otimization of C++ refactoring and assistance (Assist++), and improvements in project organization and building.

"BIOS giant Phoenix, the company responsible for the pieces of code saved on flash memory and which initialize our computers and interfaces to the hardware at the low level - even before the OS loads, is giving us plenty of reasons to support the case of an open source BIOS."

A free application environment for Linux-based handheld and mobile devices may support lots more devices in the future, including Linux mobile phones. The GPE (GPE palmtop environment) project is planning a "device abstraction" layer aimed at simplying new device ports, according to maintainer Florian Boor.

Potix has released ZK 1.0, the XUL-Java-Ajax-Beanshell based web application framework. The framework aims to simplify developing Ajax based web development by minimizing configuration and lowering developer skill requirements. A live demo is available.

"There's a lot of confusion about Windows Vista these days. Many online discussion forums have a great number of users who express no desire to upgrade to Vista. Sure, we've all seen the screenshots and maybe a video or two of Vista in action, but for many it only seems like new tricks for an old dog. Yeah, it's got some fancy 3D effects in the interface, but OS X has been doing that for years now, and it's still Windows underneath, right? The sentiment seems to be that Vista is another Windows ME. Perhaps part of the problem is that people just don't know what Vista has in store for them."

"Sun has purportedly gone out of its way to draw Linux developers to its hardware platform. Analysts even say that Sun has finally made peace with Linux. But if you look at their web site they appear to have a different story to tell as they attempt to build community support for Solaris10. Frankly, we believe Linux beats Sun in so many categories that we don't even have a race. While Sun wants you to 'get the facts' we notice that they persist in comparing Solaris10 to Red Hat's enterprise model. But that's not the only Linux out there."

"There are key utilities, command line chains, and scripts that are used to simplify different processes. Some of these tools come with the operating system, but a majority of the Unix tricks come through years of experience and a desire to ease the system administrator's life. The focus of this article is on getting the most from the available tools and insight across a range of different UNIX environments."

"With Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), you can develop a user space filesystem framework without understanding filesystem internals or learning kernel module programming. Follow this simple, step-by-step guide to install, customize, and enable FUSE and AFS, so you can create your own fully functional filesystem in user space in Linux."