After reading about Canonical Software's philosophies upon September 15th's Ubuntu Linux preview release, I knew my dial up was about to be hurting. Three days later when I had the ISO in hand and Ubuntu installed, I knew the experience had to be shared. Hopefully this article will offer some insight into this wonderful, though buggy, Debian and Gnome distribution.

With GNOME 2.8 out the door, work on the next version, 2.10, is progressing nicely. There is some new and exciting software, and it's looking to be pretty sweet. There are still many things to be done, though, and if you want to help, there's a pretty good list with things just waiting to be done by you. Maybe even more important are the Nautilus bugs (over 1300 of them) and so its project leader is asking the community to get to work and fix as many as they can.

PalmSource will go after the emerging smart-phone market with its latest operating system, looking to grow beyond its core handheld business. As expected, the market-share leader in handheld operating systems plans to announce on Tuesday the Cobalt 6.1, its first product specifically aimed at smart phones, at a developer conference in Munich.

Solaris Kernel Developer Eric Schrock is bloging more about the Solaris vs. Linux issue and linux kernel moneky Greg is answering on his blog. More here. Elsewhere, Sun is looking into making OOo's XML format an ISO standard and at license options toward opening the Java source code; here are more thoughts on those, by engineer JBQ.

BareFeats is continuing their benchmark articles for the fastest workstation/desktop machines around.

Microsoft's Windows platform chief Jim Allchin last week told 50 top-tier OEMs to think more like custom-system builders. During Microsoft's annual OEM executive summit at company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Allchin, group vice president of platforms, advised the vendors to shift development resources into creating computing "experiences" through which they can differentiate their offerings, rather than beating each other up mainly on price and spewing out product specs.

ExtremeTech previews the Ubuntu Linux distro. We will be featuring two reviews of Ubuntu this week. Update: Another Ubuntu review.

Unununium Operating Engine got its 0.1 official release on Sunday. This release boots with a minimal shell and... a python interpreter! You can download a floppy image or an ISO from the official website.

Xandros Desktop and Lycoris Desktop/LX want to power your next PC. Are they up to the task?

The long awaited Syllable 0.5.4 is now available. This release includes a completly new Desktop and Registrar server which adds important functionality to Syllable.

Apple is hinting that the immediate availability of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) could be announced at the Macworld Expo San Francisco show.

This download contains different projects and source files which are designed to show how how some common Visual FoxPro functionally is created in Visual Basic .NET. Many of these samples are directly or indirectly based on existing Visual FoxPro 8.0 Solution Samples for comparison reference. Each project is self-contained and can be run independently of any other.

Windows XP SP2 is 99% great, but the 1% that isn't turns a gift into a bomb. If Microsoft wants to win hearts and pocketbooks, then the product teams need to relearn how to treat customers with respect. With minimal effort, Microsoft could show paying customers that they are valued partners, rather than adversaries. Karsten Schneider writes about his experience with SP2, and his ideas of what it would take to turn a rock into rocks!

Perhaps surprising, and certainly not obvious to many people, is that it's been possible to develop RISC OS programs under Windows for a long time. Historically, ARM's SDK environment was able to generate RISC OS binaries, although that support was removed some time ago. More recently (but has still been true for a number of years), it's been possible to build RISC OS programs using GCCSDK under Cygwin - although bugs in the version of the compiler packaged with it did make that problematic earlier this year.