Microsoft is planning to reissue the Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Update rollup that it first launched in late June. While the company did not specify a reason for the planned reissue, a number of Windows 2000 users who have installed the download have complained of a variety of problems, ranging from incompatibility with third-party security applications to network-printing issues.

More details are leaking out about the Debian Core Consortium, which will be announced at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The public relations manager of desktop Linux vendor Linspire, Heather MacKenzie, revealed that the "the DCC's official name is the Debian Common Core Alliance."

In a series of articles (part I, part II) during the month of July, OfB's Timothy R. Butler explained why he felt that KDE needed to move beyond the Qt toolkit it uses as a foundation. In that series, he asserted that the licensing of Qt is becoming a stumbling block to the desktop's adoption. Eric Laffoon, the project lead for KDE's Kdewebdev module, takes exception to Butler's arguments and makes the case for his view on the issue of Qt at OfB.biz.

Lately, rumours had been popping up that Palm's new Treo 670 would be running Windows Mobile 5 --however, no hard evidence confirming these rumours ever appeared. Until now. This is a major blow to PalmSource. More pictures here. Note that this does not mean the device will ship with Windows Mobile 5 --it just means it can run it.

A new scripting tool targeted by a virus writer will not be part of Windows Vista, the next Windows client release, Microsoft announced Friday. Instead, the software maker is looking at delivering the command-line shell tool, code-named Monad, as part of its next major server operating system release, a Microsoft representative said. That release, code-named Longhorn Server, is due in 2007.

Bart Smaalders of Sun Microsystems has open sourced libmicro, a portable set of microbenchmarks designed to measure performance of basic system calls and library functions. This framework proved invaluable during Solaris 10 development as a way of identifying areas where performance was lagging behind other Operating Systems, as well regressions between Solaris builds. You can join the libmicro discussion at the OpenSolaris forums.

The big themes seem to be networking and minor annoyances, with a secondary focus on iChat and Mail, which always seem to have problems in the first release of a major Mac OS X version. It’s those changes—along with improvements to Tiger’s disk repair tools—that we’ll focus on during this inside look at Mac OS X 10.4.2.

There may not be fireworks. CIOs and IT directors may not be heaping their proprietary software on bonfires and dancing. Even so, the open source revolution is happening right now and will carry the day, said Bill Weinberg, open source architecture specialist and Linux evangelist for OSDL.

Read a long review titled "Mandrake Revisited: A Lycoris user revisits the OS he left years earlier". On a separate note, Linux Format issue 70 presents a Gaël Duval interview.

Bill Weinberg, OSDL Linux evangelist and speaker at next week's LinuxWorld conference, discusses the state of Linux adoption and its ongoing rivalry with Windows.

For those of you who just can't get enough Mighty Mouse news, here are a couple of tidbits: An intrepid tinkerer bought a MM, only to take it apart for all the internet to see. Also, WSJ tech oracle Walt Mossberg takes a look at the MM and compares it to Microsoft's latest Mouse offering. His verdict? "Stop the presses: Microsoft has beaten Apple on hardware design, at least in this one case."

This could be completely faked, but engadget has a screenshot of OSX x68 running on the x86 virtual machine VMWare. It's an interesting feat if its true, but it also has other implications. Since VMWare obviously does not implement any of the various DRM schemes, this would poke holes in the assertion that Apple is using Trusted Computing in its developer boxes.

Geronimo provides integration with third-party components through its unique GBeans feature. Apache Geronimo team member and committer, Jeff Genender, demonstrates this feature by showing you how to build and configure a third-party open source project with a GBean that integrates the OpenSymphony Quartz scheduler into Geronimo.

Over at IsComputerOn, an article discusses with Axel Dörfler, the Haiku move for the FreeBSD network stack. Also talked about is the thought of using ReiserFS instead of BFS.