According to this press release, European Linux developer Mandrakesoft has acquired the Brazilian Conectiva. Says the release, "This acquisition is expected to increase significantly Mandrakesoft's size and R&D capabilities."

When I joined OSNews in 2001, I did it with a great excitment because of my love for... messing around with many operating systems in order to explore news ways of doing things. Back in the '80s and the '90s there were a lot of OS projects that would draw the attention of the computer users of the time. But in this decade, it seems that other than Windows, OSX, Linux and a very few other much smaller OSes, the scene is sterile. And it's only getting worse.

The third beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 is out and about for testing.

Here's a comparison by a BSD user between FreeBSD and NetBSD. Elsewhere, the FreeBSD logo competition has just kicked out, officially this time.

Amazing is the recent interest in full, live, operating systems that can fit on a 50 MB CD-ROM. It's totally astounding that they can cram so much onto such a tiny disk. But wait.. let's run back to the days of old.. back to say 1988.

Minimo, the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is poised to move beyond Linux PDAs and onto Windows CE devices, according to the Mozilla Foundation. Screenshot here (mobile version of OSNews is showing). Elsewhere, the Mozilla chairman Mitch Kapor speaks out.

FOSDEM 2005 will take place this Week-End in Brussels, Belgium.

A number of new OpenZaurus users are having problems getting up and running with OZ. Here is my basic Getting Started guide for OpenZaurus 3.5.2.

The idea here would be to cut the driver layer out of Windows and attach it to Linux directly. This would become MS-Linux. If Microsoft actually produced an MS-Linux that was the standard Linux attached to the driver layer of Windows, giving users full Plug and Play (PnP) support of all their peripherals, nobody would buy any other Linux on the market.

Rasterman talks about other's opinions. As he says, E17 has several of the tecnoologies gnome and others are searching. He adds two videos as a proof with animate backgrounds and other things.Perhaps it's time for the linux desktop world to stop reinventing the wheel and collaborate one with each other. Gnome has things like accesibility and lots of apps, enlightenment has a very powerful rendering engine. It'd be a shame to see people reinventing the wheel.

Sony Corp. is calling an end to its Clié line of PDAs (personal digital assistants) in Japan, the company said Tuesday. The move comes eight months after the company said it would no longer sell new models of PDAs overseas and puts the cap on a product line first announced by the Tokyo company in mid-2000. Elsewhere, here's a review of the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 420.

GNOME 2.8.3 has been released: This is the third and last maintenance release of the stable 2.8.x series of GNOME and it contains a huge amount of bugfixes and other improvements since the last release. Elsewhere, a user is discussing the things that annoy him about Gnome.

Here's a very interesting article dealing with his findings on .NET after many years of working with it. It isn't pretty. It goes into detail as to what his perception of its problems, weaknesses are. In addition to his opinion that Microsoft let marketing take over what developers should have done.

There's an article up with a quote from Steve Wozniak, where he publicly chastises Apple for their lawsuits against the canadian student being sued by Apple Computer for leaking a build of 10.4, and will be donating money to the student's defense. It doesn't just stop there. Some of the biggest names in the Mac world are also listed with quotes, and the general consensus is "He made a mistake, but Apple is going too far".