Apple is holding their European Expo and nowadays being a Mac owner thought I'd go along. If Apple has such a pitiful market share then you'd expect it to be a small show with little software and few visitors. Er No, this was the complete opposite. Pictures of the Expo included.

Microsoft published a patch for a major security flaw in its software's handling of the JPEG graphics format and urged customers to use a new tool to locate the many applications that are vulnerable. Users who have installed SP2 are not vulnerable to the flaw.

ReactOS 0.2.4 has been released, and is downloadable from sourceforge.

A new "tour" is available at the SkyOS homepage, showing off what will be available in SkyOS 5.0. Included are many screenshots. This is a good summary of everything that has been done with SkyOS over the past year. In other news Developer Studio, GCC 3.4.0, Binutils 2.15, Make, Python, Autoconf, and many other development tools are new available for SkyOS, as well as Blender3D. The SkyOS community has been busy as well, developing such applications as Personal Organizer (e-mail client/organizer), SkIRC, AFTP, and a few others.

When Novell's Linux desktop arrives at the end of this year it will be stripped down to avoid integration problems and to keep it simple for users. The desktop combines functionality from Ximian and SuSE Linux, both acquired by Novell last year. Nat Friedman, Novell vice president of R&D for desktop development, told vnunet.com that this was what enterprise customers wanted.

Finally, the much anticipated version 1.0 of Firefox are out on its first preview. Read more from here and proceed to download. Also, new versions of Mozilla suite, Thunderbird were posted. Here's another article too: How to migrate from Ximian Evolution to Mozilla Thunderbird.

The Contiki operating system is a multi-tasking operating system with full TCP/IP support. Contiki is designed for memory contrained devices ranging from tiny 8-bit embedded microcontrollers to old 8-bit homecomputers like the Commodore 64. Here is a screenshot of Contiki rendering the mobile/text-mode version of OSNews (double sized, C64 only does 320x200 in this mode).

It has not been announced on Linare.com, but it appears that Linare Linux 2.0 has been uploaded to Ibiblio.org and its mirrors, and is available for free download. We will post a review of Linare PRO soon.

yellowTAB has announced that they are making Zeta's user license more family-friendly. Under the new license clause, members of a single family residing in the same household can use a single copy of Zeta on multiple computers for non-commercial purposes. Elsewhere, Adi Oanca of the Haiku OS project is participating on the App/Interface Kit development and HaikuNews interviewed him.

Lycoris, today announced that it has commenced shipping Desktop/LX 1.4 to customers after a brief delay in the original release schedule. It is available in Personal, Deluxe and PowerPak editions.

AppleInsider has got info about a new build of Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" seeded to a few select developers. Screenshots show iChatJabber support, new "Family Controls," and advanced Safari RSS features.

Red Hat's Havoc Pennington announced the "Stateless Linux" project for Fedora, an interesting new philosophy as to how software should be developed/behave. Here is the PDF with all the details.

"A number of software makers and well-known IT vendors have agreed to endorse the Free Standards Group's latest Linux standard to help create common ground for companies building open-source technologies." Read more about the Linux Standards Base 2.0 at News.com.

Novell asserts that the future of software development will not be found in the open-source or proprietary models, but in one that combines the best of both worlds--or "both source" as the company calls it.