The second beta of Mandrakelinux 10.1 was released over the weekend and here are some of the new features as published on Mandrakeclub.com. Elsewhere, "after a month of use, I've decided Linux is okay but not perfect" says Roger Mier after using Mandrake 10.

The next major release of the Mac OS X operating system will include technology that will eventually grant users more control over the way application windows are displayed to the screen. According to sources, Apple Computer's Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" OS will introduce developer support for resolution independent user interfaces (just like in Longhorn), breaking the software assumption that all display output is to be rendered at 72 dots per inch (DPI).

The imposing blue Linksys box is about to give way to a whole new crop of Wireless access points (AP) that work with the Mac OS and Windows. This article shows you four new APs that integrate hardware, software, and forward-thinking design that takes the integration of software and hardware a step further than anything that has come before it.

The XPde Team released XPde 0.5.1, the release that includes a Start Menu and fixes.

Basically, the author of cdrecord modified its license to not allow modifications of his code by distros without doing so in cooperation with the author.

Only two days behind schedule, the FreeBSD team released the first in a series of betas leading up to what will (possibly) become the 5.3-STABLE milestone. FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1 one can be obtained from here or one of many mirrors. Release notes here.

BurningShadow has released LiveCD4, which is based on LiveCD3, but uses a RAM disk, which makes it more stable and easier to use. Unlike its predecessor, this CD doesn't require floppies or other writable storage to boot. The CD image is available for download here. An installation CD, InstCD1, is also available, with which you can get a system similar to that on LiveCD4 installed permanently.

European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike.

When Lycoris released a new version of its popular Linux operating system, Desktop/LX 1.4, this week, it also debuted a new application integration infrastructure, nicknamed AI2 (A-I-squared).

The new version of open-source database PostgreSQL, which is already in beta, is expected to go into production within three months and will for the first time run natively on Windows.

Collecting debugging information from the Linux™ kernel using printk is a well-known method -- and with Kprobes, it can be done without the need to constantly reboot and rebuild the kernel. Kprobes, in combination with 2.6 kernels, provides a lightweight, non-disruptive, and powerful mechanism to insert printk's dynamically. Logging debug info such as the kernel stack trace, kernel data structures, and registers has never been so easy!

Firefox 1.0 has several new features that will greatly improve the user experience. Marcus wrote about three of them here. Our take: We hope they will support the rdf+xml type too (only rss+xml works atm).

In the August 2004 IBM Power Architecture Community Newsletter Genesi's Sven Luther and Bill Buck describe the Avalanche Desktop Reference Management Platform where Genesi is currently working on together with Avalanche.

The first release candidate for the GNU-Darwin Distribution .v 1.1 for PowerPC is now available. Get the installer here. Is is built for Darwin 7.x including Panther. It ships with GNOME 2.6.1, GNUstep, GNUMail, MPlayer etc.