The August edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available, nutshellising the OS' progress over the last month. Highlights include a website redesign, driver updates and VMware images. Additionally, LinuxBeta.com has assembled a superb slideshow running through Syllable's new desktop and apps.

"Last week's announcement of the changes in Longhorn were interesting: the backporting of Avalon and the removal of WinFS from the mix. It was clear that the only way to get Avalon adopted was by backporting it in some capacity to older OSes." Read Miguel's take on Longhorn's delays here.

While Linux clusters can handle the demands of high performance computing, they're still lacking in some key features, said Eric Pitcher, vice president of technical marketing for Linux Networx, a cluster systems provider in Bluffdale, Utah. In part one of this interview, he championed Linux clusters, citing their productivity and scalability. In part two, he discusses pricing and points out Linux clusters' current shortcomings.

Linux is evolving as the predominant operating system of the new millennium, and legacy operating systems such as OS/2 are being gradually phased out. This series of articles helps the developers involved in the tedious process of migrating/porting the OS/2 system drivers and applications to Linux. In this last of three installments, the authors focus on how to do timer calls and DLL calls in OS/2 and Linux, with a view to mapping between the two systems.

This paper on how to tune FreeBSD to better withstand DoS attacks was at OnLamp a few months ago. It is now up on Silverwraith.com, along with several other FreeBSD tuning papers by the author.

The TU Dresden OS tream is happy to announce the release of a new version of L4Env, the L4 development environment, and DDE, the Device Driver Environment for L4. It contains improved support for building L4 applications and running them on almost all of the L4 microkernels.

DistroWatch reports that a new development version of Mandrakelinux 10.1, PPC edition, is now available. Highlights: Linux kernel 2.6.8rc2; NPTL support; X11R6.7.0, GNOME 2.6, KDE 3.2.3, etc.

Despite the impressive list of achievements of open source software, it can be argued that there have not been any world-class games created under the open source banner. Sure, several old games like Doom and Quake have been gifted to the open source community, but there are no comparable original creations in this area. One should not expect this situation to change anytime soon, because the open source development model does not make sense for game development.

Sun Microsystems will begin compensating its sales staff for Solaris deals that involve hardware from other manufacturers, as part of the company's efforts to fend off competition from low-cost servers running Linux.

While many applaud the timely release of Avalon & Indigo and MS' decision to "stop dreaming and wake up," others warn the company that it is eroding its credibility and letting Linux make usability gains.

Apple unveiled the new G5-based iMac, an all-in-one computer with 17/20" LCD screens. My Take: The product looks good visually, but I would have preferred if the bottom border of the screen wasn't as long compared to the other three, slicker, border sides (mockup). To customers, I would recommend the middle model: 17" LCD, 1.8 GHz G5, Superdrive, for $1499 US (just add Bluetooth). Good value.

The primary focus of Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is improved security. In addition, the service pack includes roll-ups of all reported customer issues found after the release of the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. Of particular note, SP1 provides better support for consuming WSDL documents, Data Execution prevention and protection from security issues such as buffer overruns. XP version, 2003 Server version.

Interested in building plug-ins, but not sure where to start? In this first article in a four-part series, you'll learn how to put together a simple authentication plug-in for a project in C#.

After nearly two years on the market, makers of tablet PCs based on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition have yet to prove that the pen is mightier than the keyboard.