Janice Winsor details the two new installation configurations of the Solaris 9 release.

"I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space." A very interesting read from S2's CEO about the legal side of OSes today. And it seems he is not far off the truth at all.

The well-known limitation of BeOS to crash when too much memory is installed is now hacked around by some people in the community. The first patch, patches the kernel to "think" that only 64 MB is installed in the machine. We would advise the team to make multiple hack packages for 64, 128, 256, 384, 512, 640 and 768 MBs of RAM (the right amount is different for each user because it depends on the MBs the graphics card reports to the PCI level, not just how much RAM and gfx RAM is actually installed). This hack is for BeOS 5.x systems.

A. Domo has released a new version of his NTFS driver for QNX. The new version runs as a daemon.

AbiWord 2.0.2 and GIMP 2.0-pre3 are available for SkyOS. SkyOS 5.0-beta4 will include AbiWord and GIMP as GTK ports as well as a few other GTK applications like a Calender, Notepad etc. In other news, a new binary PE handler (faster program loading/linking) has been implemented as well as SkyGI performance improvements.

InnoTek GCC for OS/2 is a commercial distribution of the GNU C/C++ compiler suite and associated utilities for the IBM OS/2 platform. InnoTek maintains an OS/2 platform port of the GNU C/C++ compiler suite and provides comprehensive support for the compiler environment to enterprise customers. Read more at eComStation's web site.

MySQL has taken a step to mend a rift in the open-source world by updating a controversial licensing provision that had broken a close tie between the MySQL database and another software package.

Houston Chronicle reviews the Firefox browser and for the most part it gets a glorious review.

Today we feature a very interesting interview with well known *BSD hacker Matthew Dillon over his latest project, DragonFly BSD (also known for his Linux kernel contributions, Amiga C compiler hacking back in the day and the Backplane distributed database). Matthew discusses DragonFly's status, goals, the overall BSD platform, innovation, and more. Update: Added one more question at the end of the Q&A.

Most modern Unix-based operating systems (e.g. Linux, MacOS X, and BSD) come with a little console-mode utility called GNU Screen. It's a powerful tool in the hands of the console warrior, a veritable Swiss Army knife of text-mode human-computer interaction.

DotGNU's Portable.Net is a portable suite of tools (including a C# compiler, assembler, and runtime engine). In this release, the C to IL bytecode compiler is now in good shape, and many bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms and System.Xml.

ekkoBSD.org has announced the latest beta release of the ekkoBSD Operating System to the public today.This release supports the Sparc 64bit Platform.

Download the second beta of Gnome 2.6, while you can read the announcement and changelog here.

If HP and IBM can't make money selling the same or lesser boxes for more, what reason is there to believe that Sun can? Scott McNealy used to describe x86 retailing as adding bruises to bananas, but now he's doing it. Read the article at LinuxInsider.