I was happy as an iMac G5 owner, now I am a happy Linux user again: good news is coming from the growing linux-on-mac community.

From Microsoft Watch: Microsoft quietly delivered a first private beta release of Windows Server "R2" to the first of about 1,000 testers on Wednesday, company officials confirmed Friday. Meanwhile, Microsoft is soliciting a wider pool of beta testers for a second R2 beta, which it is planning to deliver in the second quarter of 2005...

A new kernel for an OS caled LSE/OS was developed by a french research laboratory: Epita System Laboratory. This laboratory is specialized in low-level system programming.For more than one year this laboratory has been developing an extremely stable nanokernel with specific features that place it in a very special class of systems. Read on for more. Update: English version here.

Syllable 0.5.5 is now available. This release includes new and updated drivers and a large number of long overdue kernel enhancements. The full changelog is here, and it can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

As seen on kerneltrap.org: "In response to a question raised on the dragonfly-kernel mailing-list, Matt Dillon gives an overview of plans to revise the DragonFly userland scheduler, the second of two schedulers that Dragonfly currently utilizes in a layered fashion. Matt explains, 'There are actually two schedulers.. there's the LWKT scheduler, which is as close to perfect as its possible to be, and there is the userland scheduler, which is the one that needs work.'"

Nicholas Otley has built a QEMU hosted version of AROS Max for MS Windows. It's easy to use, just run the self extracting archive and double-click the winaros.bat file to run AROS-Max in a window. Get the file here or visit the Aros-Exec message board.

Tamura Kent formally unveils his plans to add new functionality to NetBSD's audio framework (audio(9) and audio(4)) - specifically, the addition of an audio converter pipeline and in-kernel mixing. These additions along with audio device cloning would make it possible to natively support hardware mixing without the use of a software based soundserver.

Flexbeta has got a review of VMWare Workstation 5.0. This new beta includes many nice features such as the ability to capture movies, and support for 64Bit hardware.

A small startup in Microsoft's backyard is poised to begin shipping a tiny, 32-pin chip-like computer module that runs ".NET Embedded," a new Microsoft embedded software platform developed for use in watches and other "smart personal objects." The module, developed by startup .netcpu Corp., incorporates portions of Microsoft's Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) hardware and software.

This time Eduardo turns to issues more related to hardware. First we'll see how to enable removable drives in a Slack installation, with especial attention to floppies; and then Eduardo will examine how to setup new hardware, using a scanner as an example, since its setup was tricky. Read the whole adventure at OfB.biz. My Take: Honestly, I hope someone could come up with an administrative GUI for DevFS & uDev so users can set permissions on device nodes without having their heads explode.

The third in a three-part series on how to leverage Linux to get the most from your network, this tutorial shows how to use Samba to integrate your Linux and Windows networks (reg. req.). Sample code and configuration files are provided throughout to aid understanding.

The Smalltalk green book, Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice text is now online. Also, the now discontinued SharpDevelop book Disecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop is now available for download.

YaifO is a modified OpenBSD installer for remote installations or updates via Secure Shell. It has been tested and should work on Alpha, i386, Sparc and Sparc64. It is especially useful for people who like to switch their root server from Linux to OpenBSD without access to a serial line or keyboard.

Debian Woody, the current stable release for over 2 years, and Sarge, the new upcoming stable release due out in a month or two, support no fewer than 11 architectures. Perhaps surprisingly, AMD64 is not one of them and it won't be in Sarge either.