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.

The KDE project started an effort to redesign its Kcontrol panel and here is the outcome so far (in CVS). Update: A developer's article, how to build a KDE plugin structure.

Some interesting Longhorn and .NET articles for developers appeared on MSDN:

The second generation of OSNews' mobile web site is now up and running. The new version has an even simpler design than before which makes it much easier to render on under-featured HTML browsers, usually found on phones, PDAs or other embedded devices. The new design does not display any ads or a sidebar, but goes directly to the "meat" of the information. Read more for info & screenshots.

The Inquirer reports that Microsoft released the Xbox 2 SDK for the Apple Power Mac G5s, but no one knows as of yet if it runs natively or via VirtualPC or if it is 64bit or not.

"Windowing environments are in their third decade, and they still do little more than open and close. There's no reason windows can't be more sophisticated", Daryl Blakeslee writes on NewsForge.

Mindwarp wrote a quick guide which shows step-by-step how to setup a CVS pserver in FreeBSD over at mindwarp.net: "CVS stands for Concurrent Versions System. You can check out the official homepage at cvshome.org. Basically what it comes down to is tons of projects, open source, free software, and commercial use CVS to manage their code. It lets you go back to previous versions."