Since we haven't posted anything about the new Windows Vista beta release lately... Stardock's Brad Wardell writes "I've put together a first look at the first beta of Windows Vista. In the coming days I hope to delve deep into the guts of Microsoft's new OS but I've tried to put together a decent overview of what Windows Vista is all about."

Friday, July 29th, 2005, is the 6th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. "Let's face it," the website reads, "System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work."

Apple's Lisa was one of the earliest computers to take advantage of the graphical user interface pioneered at Xerox PARC, and it was the first to feature a desktop file browser. Read about the development (and demise) of the venerable Lisa at Braeburn.

For the "bleeding edge," the FreeDOS distribution GNU/DOS 2005 has had 15 software updates so far, including those dealing with speed and bug fixes, an improved menu system, a new screen saver, and a new package management system since its release last month to prepare for GNU/DOS 2006, which should be released by this winter. You can download these updates at the official GNU/DOS Web page. Meanwhile, the operating system/programming language TextOS has been updated to versions v1.0b9 and v2.0b8, which are both faster and include an updated version of the supplied editor/file viewer. Download both versions at the official TextOS Web page.

Last Saturday on the 23rd of July Amigans worldwide celebrated the 20th birthday of the Amiga platform at several events and gatherings. It was the 23rd of July 1985 when the Amiga 1000 was unveiled to the public at the Lincoln Center in New York. At the three biggest Amiga birthday events there were also extensive AmigaOS4 presentations. Here is AmigaWorld's extensive report.

KDE 3.4.2 is the second maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. Changelog and download.

"When I initially published the article, Boot Fedora Linux Faster, neither my server or me was ready for 22k visitors in one day. It seems that there is a great interest in the topic of reducing boot time. So I think a challenge is in order to get Linux people together to try to reduce boot time."

GNOME 2.12 Beta 1 has been released. Download: platform, desktop and bindings.

"In this article I describe my experience with Mandrake/Mandriva and try to explain why it suits a starter in Linux and is still a usefull distro when you get more experience." Note that ReviewLinux.com has adopted a very confusing way of browsing through the article: you need to use the tabs on top.

Although many people claim that Linux is well on its way to replacing Unix, the reality is that Linux is Unix: a particular stream within a much wider community whose traditions and ideas both surround and extend those found in the Linux group.

Tapwave, the third most popular Palmsource licensee behind Palm (and Sony in the past) and makers of the Zodiac PDA/gaming device, has gone out of business.

Ever since Be, Inc. was dissolved and its BeOS technology was turned over to the Palm OS charnel house in '01, Be fans have been eagerly awaiting a successor to their favorite operating system, with very few rays of hope since. Earlier this month, however, yellowTAB released their BeOS descendent Zeta. Have Be fans finally found their savior, or is this just another failed attempt at reviving the dead? Read on — this review will help you decide exactly that.

While Vista Beta 1 is stealing most of the headlines this week, Microsoft also is delivering simultaneously on wednesday to a group of private testers the first beta of its Longhorn Server product.

Yesterday Firefox's dowloads reached it's 75 million mark. That's 25 million downloads in less then 3 months, well above all previous expectations. Due to its imense popularity and the upcoming release of Firefox 1.5, the team is hoping to reach 100 million downloads in the next 2 months.