SkyOS Beta 8 was released last week to beta testers, along with a small patch released a day later to fix some issues (updatable by the SkyOS update system). Beta 8 of course includes re-enabled networking, along with a few networking applications (Gaim and Links, with more to follow). Beta 8 also includes an updated ISS with integrated video (allowing for features such as video preview in viewer window), updated GCC to 3.4.0, Blender 3D CGI application and many bugfixes. Up next: USB.

A die-hard PC user's perspective on Macs, by AndandTech.

The developers of Vector Linux have announced that work has started on a next release, version 5.0.

Tom Adelstein seems to know a lot about Sun and sets out here to give the whole story behind Sun and Red Hat's disagreements.

In the second of a three-part series, David and Brad build on their first article on R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. R is both a strongly functional programming language and a general environment for statistical exploration of data sets. Now that our data is shipshape, we will delve into the functionality of the language.

The first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.1 for AMD64 and Intel EM64T is available. More info here.

Winter has ended in Melbourne but I'm not the sort to venture out without at least a sweater. However, the cold doesn't seem to bother Theo de Raadt as Sam Varghese sit in the lobby of the city's Duxton Hotel, a day after the end of the annual summit of the Australian Unix and Open Source User Group.

Freddie Kavanagh, Novell's chief technology officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, gave attendees an update on the progress of Open Enterprise Server and Novell Linux Desktop, the two major products intended to bring together Novell's legacy customers with technology acquired from Ximian and SuSE. Both are expected by the end of this year, although Novell expects OES to make more of an immediate impact than the desktop.

Sam Hiser is taking a look at Sun's Java Desktop System, from the Enterprise and Java point of view.

In response to a recent bug report on the lkml, Jeff Garzik, the maintainer of the Serial ATA subsystem and network device drivers, had some harsh words for kernel preemption. In the bug report it was mention that kernel preemption was enabled to which Jeff replied, "I strongly recommend disabling kernel preemption. It is a hack that hides bugs". The comment lead into an interesting discussion.

Modern operating systems give you the possibility to encrypt filesystems. Or virtual filesystem as the loopback ones. This article discuss two ways of getting an encrypted loopback on linux.

I believe that many IT CEOs want to beat down Microsoft in the new embedded systems market, but they always encounter numerous obstacles.

In this interview, Chris Schlaeger, Vice President R&D for SUSE/Novell and long time KDE contributer, talks about Novells desktop plans, OpenOffice.org Integration, Groupwise support in KDE's instant messanger Kopete, the Kontact groupware client as well as the integration of the Gecko rendering engine into Konqueror. He also shares interesting opinions and ideas for the future of KDE.

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Many things have changed since 1.0. The R language has acquired namespaces, exception handling constructs, formal methods and classes, much improved garbage collection, generalized I/O via connection objects, and considerable improvements in the graphics area. The user workspace has been reorganized, and so has the set of packages that ship with R. Several "recommended packages" deemed indispensable in a statistical system are bundled.