NetBSD 1.6.2 has been released, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.2 release announcement.

GTK (The GIMP Toolkit) has been ported to SkyOS. With this GTK port, major GTK applications like GIMP, Abiword, and Gaim can now be ported to SkyOS. A number of additional libraries were ported as well to make the GTK port possible. These libraries will be available in source and binary form when SkyOS 5.0 is publicly available (internally, SkyOS 5.0-beta4 will be the first beta to include this).

This article discusses the Swing concept of a pluggable look and feel and offers some thoughts on how to use it in a way that is both convenient for the programmer and desirable for the user experience.

Microsoft's bet-the-company initiative turns 4 this year. Are developers happier? Has the Windows experience improved? InfoWorld reviews .Net's tools and technologies for a top-to-bottom evaluation.

The SCO Group Inc. was granted leave last week to amend its case against IBM Corp. Trade secret claims have been dropped, and replaced with copyright infringement claims, Blake Stowell, SCO's corporate communications manager said Monday.

Support for animated cursors on Mac OS X was added. Compiler and platform-specific issues were addressed. General bugfixes were made in Qt 3.3.1. Announcement, changelog, download.

With a strategy dubbed Linux-on-Power, Big Blue is pairing its Power platform and Linux as a way to expand its reach into 64-bit computing.

You want to build a thread system? Experiment with an OS with memory protection and virtual memory? You want to do that without a lot of rebooting, Bochs/VMWaremagic and writing drivers? Well, then Nachos (Not Another Completely Heuristic Operating System) is for you. Nachos is an Operating System simulator. Hmm... . If you're a bit like me, you'll be wondering what in the world that is.

Microsoft is readying updates to its programming tools that will be released in tandem with Windows XP Service Pack 2, a security-oriented release of Windows due later this year. Elsewhere, ActiveWin published a preview of the SP2 for XP.

Luis Alves put together a review of Mandrake Linux's 10-RC with a handful of screenshots.

The XFree86 Project released XFree86 4.4.0 for seventeen platforms. Release notes here.

On February 7th, The NetBSD Foundation held it's annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what things are planned for the coming year.

Yet another interesting project comes from Mozilla: MiniMo is a mini-Mozilla browser for PDAs and embedded systems. It requires anything between 32MB and 64MB of RAM and it currently runs on ARM CPUs using GTK+ (screenshots). Having just uploaded our latest OSNews web site for mobile devices, we hope that the MiniMo developer team have added a special/unique word in its user agent, so we can add it in the list of browsers that render our mobile version of our site instead of the desktop version.

When a good idea fails the loss is not just that idea, the failure scares away potential investors from anything resembling that idea; consequently, innovation suffers and everyone pays the price. The software industry is especially good at killing good ideas, and Usman Latif's article "Why Good Ideas Fail" discusses the reasons behind this terrible record.