Serenity Systems International (SSI) has announced an open (public) beta program for its Serenity Virtual Station (SVISTA) product, a virtual machine application for Intel based PCs. The software being tested runs on Linux, MS Windows, and IBM's OS/2. A FreeBSD version is planned for later this year.

Sun put up a "planet" page consisting of blogs of Sun engineers. Check it out here as they mention some Solaris news among other things.

Microsoft put up a site asking for feedback about Win2k3. All feedback submitted will be sent to the Windows Server Development Team for review and analysis. Your ideas can impact Windows Server in many ways, and might even be incorporated into new Service Packs, Feature Packs etc.

Novell is an interesting company, and has only become more so since it decided to dive head first into GNU/Linux last year. Nat Friedman, formerly of Novell acquired Ximian and now the veep of Novell's Linux Technologies Group took some time to answer OfB.biz's questions about exactly where the company is heading with GNU/Linux.

A feisty Oracle comes out swinging at the government's insistence that its proposed acquisition of PeopleSoft would be detrimental to the business software market. Elsewhere, a trial preperation shows Microsoft, SAP mulled merger: The companies initiated merger discussions late last year, but eventually broke off talks for reasons of complexity, according to information uncovered during discovery in the Oracle case. However, Apple's top executive said Monday that the company does not plan any mergers, though it has $5 billion cash in the bank. On the opposite side, longtime Wall Street analyst Steven Milunovich is urging HP's top management to split the company into two separate businesses.

Sun's announcement this week that it plans to make Solaris an "open-source" operating system has been met with mixed reactions from users and scepticism from open-source advocates. "I'm totally nonplussed by the announcement," said Dale Pickford, chief infrastructure officer at Ocwen Technology. Ocwen last year consolidated around 140 servers into several high-end Sun servers running Solaris - one with more than 100 processors. For smaller servers with four or fewer CPUs, Linux on Intel is suitable, Pickford said. But for systems larger than that, "the Sparc and Solaris environment really comes into its own," he said. "And once you start playing at that level anyway, you don't want to be messing with the OS." LinuxWorld has an article as well on the open sourcing of Java and Solaris.

Apple released a security patch that fixes what the company called the first "critical" Mac OS X flaw. Apple today also introduced AirPort Express, "the world's first 802.11g mobile base station that can be plugged directly into the wall for wireless Internet connections and USB printing, or thrown into a laptop bag to bring wireless freedom to hotel rooms with broadband connections." More here and here.

"I'm busy and want to sleep soundly and not with one eye on my internet-exposed hosts. Therefore I picked OpenBSD 3.5 as the operating system for the firewalling router handling my new home office connection." Read the article at ComputerWorld.

Fedora Core 2 is a good general-purpose Linux distribution, but it lacks support, says eWEEK Labs. Update: Here's another Fedora review, but it's in Czech.

A market research report on database sales last year found that Oracle has the most market share and that revenue from databases overall grew slightly last year.

yellowTAB is currently revamping the media services in Zeta by adding new native CODECs to the Media Kit, and developing a brand new native media player application, code named Champion. This will add native support for common media formats that cannot be currently played in the BeOS platform, as well as high-performance video streaming capabilities to Zeta. Also, TuneTracker will include Zeta in its CD from now on. Elsewhere, a USB mass storage driver for BeOS 5 was released.

This is a detailed newbie guide for the net install (ftp install) of the latest SuSE, 9.1.

Example: You have the Linux 2.4.26 kernel source. Fact: You want to install the newest 2.4.xx kernel. Problem: You have GCC-3.4.0 installed. Solution: Temporarily install GCC-3.3.3. Here's where relink comes in!

The BeO5Max project has just released their first beta of BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V3. Currently the ISO comes in multiple .rar files but a single .zip is expected today. Because of the nature of the BFS filesystem, BeO5Max has a non-standard way of burning ISOs, so make sure you read here & here.