I recently blogged on a disconcerting trend that I see at USENIX, and for OS research more generally.

There is a certain thing about skinning. It's just relaxing. Changing skins, browsing for skins, adding icons, trying out different color schemes in order to find the best match. The skinning community is quite large, ranging from people who change only their WinAmp skin, to people who use different DE's on Unix-like systems. In fact, you are also skinning when you don't use a DE; since the command line is in fact a type of 'skin' as well.

"SkyOS 5.0 Beta 7 has been released for beta testers. The biggest changes in beta 7 are of course the addition of multi-user support and BASH, but many, many small and large bugs have also been fixed as well." Read other news at SkyOS homepage.

Microsoft is developing a version of its Windows Server 2003 operating system that is designed to handle applications running across dozens of single- or dual-processor computers working in parallel.

Conectiva Linux 10 was released. Read more here and here.

A 6-page review on the state of KOffice and plenty of screenshots.

The code for release candidate 2 finally looks like a real release candidate. And sure enough, it will help you big-time with security. But what sorts of headaches will the eventual final version mean for IT shops? InformationWeek takes it piece by piece.

wx.NET 0.5 official has been released. Their webpage has also been updated: user manual, API reference, class status, and screenshots.

Libranet is a debian based distribution and is a progeny of Libra Computer Systems Ltd. The platypus has written a review of the free trial of libranet 2.8.1 at his site.

Brad Abrams describes the System namespace, which is the root of all namespaces in the .NET Framework, containing all other namespaces as subordinates. Elsewhere, in another chapter, Dan Kent picks apart the code of the online community application seeing how it works.

DaveFancella.com posted a mixed review of Mandrake Linux 10.

Some people prefer the convenience of pre-compiled binaries in the form of RPMs or other such installer methods. But this can be a false economy, especially with programs that are used frequently: precompiled binaries will never run as quickly as those compiled with the right optimizations for your own machine. If you use a distributed compiler, you get the best of both worlds: fast compile and faster apps. This article shows you the benifits of using distcc, a distributed C compiler based on gcc, that gives you significant productivity gains.

Rael Dornfest, co-author of Mac OS X Panther Hacks, has selected these three hacks from the book for your sampling pleasure. The first two detail how to find anyone in your Address Book who has an Amazon Wish List, and how to build a GUI to your Unix scripts with a bit of Perl/Python; the third is fun.

After a number of requests from the community, Bash and Coreutils have been ported to SkyOS. With GCC and Make already ported, it will now be much easier to port/compile Unix-compatible applications. In other news, SkyOS 5.0 beta 7 will be available to beta testers on Monday, and will feature, among other things, multi-user support. Elsewhere, Syllable just got a Voodoo3/4/5 driver.