A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets, a pioneer of the World Wide Web said. More editorials on the subjects here and here. This is a good opportunity to remind everyone that both OSNews.com and GnomeFiles.org support ~120 mobile HTML-capable devices automatically (no reason to enter special URLs) in addition to our WAP-only sites. About 2,000 readers visit daily OSNews with such devices (out of ~250,000 readers, on average, daily).

Apple could soon control 5 percent of the desktop computer market, Morgan Stanley predicts, thanks to the success of the iPod. Elsewhere, Apple released Mac OS X security update today.

As we already know, the performance of DOOM 3 for Mac in comparison to its Windows counterpart is a little depressing - but those tests were on a Mac running Panther. Now running Tiger, some have seen an incredible performance boost. A clean install of both the latest Tiger beta (8A414) and DOOM 3 saw a steady 35-40 FPS at 1024x768 on High quality, with 2x Anti-aliasing enabled. Quite an improvement over Panther.

From Amigaworld.net: "Thanks to Crisot, finally a new AmigaOS4 video showing Petunia JIT, WarpOS, Warp3D 5.0 and many many other fantastic features". The video shows AOS4's speed, stability, and responsiveness on a PPC G3 800HMz.

"Mandrakesoft, publisher of the Mandrakelinux operating system, today announces adjustments in the 2005 Mandrakelinux release schedule. Several changes will occur: (1) a new release cycle for retail products, (2) a new naming scheme, (3) the integration of Conectiva's technology into Mandrakelinux, and (4) the immediate availability of a transitional product." Read the rest of the press release here

2003 was the year with Gentoo written all over it in the Linux universe. Last year was Ubuntu's & MEPIS'. I believe that Arch Linux's year is the current one. Read more for a comparison of Arch to existing distributions, and why we think it rocks and where we think it still requires some work.

Benedikt Meurer of XFce is hard at work preparing Thunar, the new XFce-focused file manager. There are four UI suggestions so far, but the first one seems to be the strongest one so far: a mix of GTK+'s file selector and Mac OS X's Finder & PathFinder.

A Hurd Live CD was released, for everyone that always wanted to give it a try.

The KDE Bluetooth Framework is a set of tools built on top of Linux' Bluetooth stack BlueZ. It provides easy access to the most common Bluetooth actions. The first beta of the upcoming 1.0 version is available for testing. My Take: I had a quick look and I was positively surprised by the level of depth and abilities offered in this beta (notification icon & daemon, action's kio addons, kcontrol pref panels, konqueror registered protocol, other utils). However, much work remains to be done in the usability department, as it's pretty complicated to do anything more than send a file to another Bluetooth device (many of the related dialogs are scattered in many places and they feel disconnected).

Adam Doxtater writes that some developers build desktop Linux for a living, and some build it with heart. Some developers understand the needs of desktop users and some just seem to live inside your head. Some may argue that Linspire, Inc. is either, neither, or both, but I am here to clear the air. For good. Review with screenshots.

A new FreeVMS release is available and a new bliss compiler is available in this release.

Aalaap Ghag reviews the Xandros Desktop OS 3 OCE in his 3-page article.

Ark Linux has released its first stable version: after 3 years of development and testing, the Ark Linux team have decided to release the first stable version, Ark Linux 2005.1.

Flexbeta.net has got an extensive look at setting up Mandrake Linux as a firewall. The article goes deep inside the setup process from setting the firewall rules to testing and enhancing the firewall.