James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that update 2.0.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 2.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. More details are available in the NetBSD 2.0.2 Release Announcement.

Channel 9 has Dave Probert (who used to be a UNIX head but is now an architect for Windows) giving a four part video presentation of the Windows NT kernel. He does a very good job of comparing the Windows kernel to UNIX-style kernels and how they tackle the same problems differently.Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Damn Small Linux is a minimalist, business card size live CD/live USB (with a hard disk installation option) designed for older computers. Version 1.0 has been released. Our intro article is here.

Inotify is a file system event-monitoring mechanism slated for inclusion in upcoming Linux™ kernels that is designed to serve as an effective replacement for dnotify, which was the de facto file-monitoring mechanism supported in older kernels. Inotify is a powerful, fine-grained, asynchronous mechanism ideally suited for a variety of file-monitoring needs including, but not limited to, security and performance.

"It's our biggest leap forward since the original Macintosh in 1984," Apple Chief Executive Steven Jobs said of the release of OS 10.4 Tiger. Certainly, Tiger is proof that Apple isn't ignoring its traditional business. Many of its features are the kinds of behind-the-scenes capabilities that are unlikely to attract much attention but are nonetheless important.

After many years of trying, Branden Robinson has finally won the Debian Project Leader election. Linux Magazine has an in depth interview with Robinson about his plans as DPL, the problems that face Debian, and what it's like to finally win the election.

This is the 30th anniversary of USENIX, the Advanced Computer Association. USENIX was started in 1975 as 'The Unix Users Group' and has been holding regular conferences ever since (along with many other activities, of course). USENIX focuses on the Unix world, including unix-like OSes like Linux. The USENIX conference is the place to go if you want to find out about topics such as advanced system administration or the latest filesystem research projects. USENIX is a blend of academic presentations and socialization. If you want to ask Andy Tanenbaum what he thinks of Linux, you can do it at USENIX.

One fundamental difference guarantees that Windows will continue to dominate says Tom Yager.

Linux advocates hoping to convert Windows users to the open source operating system are more likely to succeed with technophobes and very inexperienced computer users than with Windows power users.

This is supposed to be the "smartphone for the masses" selling at around $400 without a contract in US (the phone hasn't been released officially in US yet so it's rare to find). Here's a comprehensive review of the unit at GSMArena with plenty of pictures. The device comes with a recent build of Symbian OS v7. Pros: GPRS class 10, EDGE class 5, 1.3 MP camera, Bluetooth, includes a 32 MB MMC card, FM radio, image/video editor, Real player, 176x208 hi-res screen, email, XHTML browser. Drawbacks: It seems to be using a rare kind of MMC (about $55 for 256 MB), only 6 MBs of internal memory, earphones only deliver mono sound for mp3 playback and they don't seem reliable with FM either.

The Enterprise Volume Management System, or EVMS, is a disk, partition, and file system manager for Linux that claims to be a comprehensive tool for all disk management tasks. I ran across EVMS and found the idea appealing, so I decided to try it out. I've been working with it for a couple of weeks now, and this article describes what I found.

Neither SCO Group's copyright claims on select Linux code nor Microsoft will be able to slow the spread of Linux in the enterprise over the next two years, an analyst for Gartner Research said. The biggest hurdles to greater Linux enterprise penetration are process-based, according to George Weiss.

Moore's Law has helped keep the IT industry riding along on ever faster and more complex hardware for 40 years, but its author now says the software side of the equation needs some serious work.

JD4X v0.5 now supports both jdk v1.4 or v1.5 (jdk 5). The binary version released is however, compiled for jdk 1.5 (jdk 5).