After a year of beta testing, TnFOX (forked from the FOX toolkit) has made its first production ready release. TnFOX extends FOX in a number of important areas such as mission-critical support, multithreading, exception-safety, strong encryption, Inter-Process Communication (IPC), Python bindings, human language translation and enhanced host OS facilities access in a Qt API compatible fashion. TnFOX is available for Win32/Win64, Linux and FreeBSD.

A recent post in Jonathan Schwartz blog says there were 151,039 SPARC and 269,856 x64/x86 downloads for Solaris 10 so far. "An early look suggests we're not going to have a problem with demand" Schwartz said.

Flexbeta.net has got its take on Windows XP Reduced Media Edition, which is basically Windows XP Pro stripped of its Windows Media Player. To sum it up, there is hardly any noticable difference between XP RME and XP Pro, except for the welcome screen and Windows not recognizing their own file format.

Apple has to fight off three of the biggest PC companies, sick of the security bugs that plague Windows, wanting to license the Mac operating system. My take: Embrace it my child, don't fight it off.

Valentine's day is just around the corner and your geek personality has trouble picking up a gift for your (semi-geek) girlfriend? Look no further! FiraCosmetics has released lip-gloss and shadow make-up kits that look like the legendary PalmV PDA!

Internet browser speed tests: Opera seems to be the fastest browser for Windows. Firefox is not faster than IE, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice.

After everything is installed and setup properly, it's important to keep an eye on updating the system. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, Ed focuses on security updates and optimization in the latest part of his FreeBSD series.

This article discusses detailed similarities and differences between booting Linux on an x86-based platform (typically a PC-compatible SBC) and a custom embedded platform based around PowerPC, ARM, and others. It discusses suggested hardware and software designs and highlights the tradeoffs of each. It also describes important design pitfalls and best practices.

This article illuminates many reasons why Sun faces an uphill battle in keeping enterprise customers interested in it's operating system, describing a large enterprise customer choosing Linux over Solaris and IBM over Sun.

Microsoft's Security Chief says that Windows is safer than Linux. Mike Nash made the comments while stressing that the company is making progress on security. He compared vulnerabilities in Windows with those in Red Hat or SuSE Linux. Update: Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft in the UK has claimed that 'Linux is not ready for mission critical computing.'

When Microsoft delivers a beta version of Longhorn during the first half of this year, it will include support for "auxiliary displays," company officials said Wednesday at the VSLive conference.

This is a brief introduction to Gnome optimization, both the hows and the whys. Details of individual tools and techniques are left for later articles, but a collection of hints and tricks is provided. Update: GNOME 2.10 Beta 2 is the first pre-release intended for wide public scrutiny before the final release.

These series of articles helps you migrate your Win32 C/C++ applications to Linux on POWER. Win32 C/C++ Apps to Linux Part-1 of this series coveres the Win32 APIs mapping to Linux on POWER regarding the initialization and termination, process, thread, and shared memory services. Win32 C/C++ Apps to Linux Part-2 illustrates how to map Win32 to Linux with respect to mutex application program interfaces (APIs).

As mentioned last week, we have five fine books to give away. Two will go to existing OSNews members, two will go to readers, members or not, who participate in enlightened discourse on our comments and forums, and one will go to a new member who signed up between last week and tomorrow. Only a handful of people have signed up as new members, so if you sign up today, you have a great chance of winning a free book. Winners will be chosen this weekend, so you only have one more day to make yourself eligible.