This review is targeted towards current Microsoft Windows users, Apple Macintosh users and novice/new Linux users alike. Its goal is to introduce you to the Xandros Desktop Operating System Version 2.0 Deluxe boxed. Read it at DesktopOS.com.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that The NetBSD Foundation Inc. now is classified as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) publicly-funded non-profit organization. Donations to the Foundation by US taxable entities are now fully tax-deductible. For more information about donations to The NetBSD Foundation, please see: http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/, Other contributions are, of course, also always welcome.

Many improvements have been made in the Linux 2.6 kernel to favor enterprise applications. This article presents results from the IBM Linux Technology Center's Web serving testing efforts, comparing the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels from various aspects. The highlights here are the key enhancements in the 2.6 kernel, the test methodologies, and the results of the tests themselves. Bottom line: the 2.6 kernel is much faster than 2.4 for serving Web pages, with no loss in reliability.

After reading a discussion on DistroWatch asking if users were happy with their current distribution, I noticed a common thread of those who have had similar experiences as myself with juggling various Linux distributions. Like myself, they feel many Linux distributions are great, but no one quite feels like home. None of them quite fit the bill and they may even begin to think that every OS sucks.

Sun is rolling out a sweeping set of security enhancements to Solaris, punctuated by a kernel rewrite and a partnership with VeriSign. InfoWorld has an article too.

PalmSource on Tuesday officially announced it will divide its operating system efforts, working on both entry-level and high-end versions of the operating system.

The canvas widget in the Tk toolkit is a powerful free software tool for creating and manipulating structured graphics.

HP has given its hardware line a good scrubbing on Monday, refreshing a broad list of server and storage systems. HP has now included SuSE Enterprise Server 8 on its corporate price list for one- to four-processor Integrity servers. In addition, HP has sent out a beta of Version 8.1 of the OpenVMS operating system for Itanium boxes. In the meantime, Sun Microsystems plans to unveil a major overhaul to its server line on Tuesday, when it will introduce systems that use its own new UltraSparc IV chip and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor.

In Part 1 I discussed how the software development world is about to be turned on it's head. Now in Part 2 I look at how the hardware world may be about to undergo even bigger changes and why it wont be a hardware manufacturer leading the way.

"Avalon" applications and Microsoft Windows.Forms applications share many similarities. Both are managed solutions with many of the same underpinnings governing .NET Framework-based applications. There are, however, also differences between the two application models. Understanding these similarities and differences will help you assess how to adapt an existing Windows Forms application to take advantage of the capabilities in "Longhorn." On other news, Longhorn is set to kill middleware: the server version of Longhorn will include business process orchestration features to allow users to link together Web services, among other tasks, without the need for additional middleware.

Total Cost of Ownership for Entry-Level and Mid-Range Clusters by Techwise Research. A detailed analysis of the total cost of ownership of three different RISC-based server clusters including HP OpenVMS, IBM AIX and Sun Solaris. Read the whitepaper here.

Mad Penguin put up an article with some mockups about a Slackware packager front-end. On other interface news, gTask is a daemon and client library that allows programs to communicate the progress of certain long running operations (e.g. downloading files, printing, etc) to the daemon. Various user interfaces can report on the progress of these tasks to the user. The project created after inspiration of an OSNews article. On yet another interface article, here is what Roberto Alsina wrote regarding the relationship between free software writers and UI designers.

Mozilla Foundation renamed its next generation browser from Firebird to "Firefox" and has released version 0.8 (release notes). The new release features streamlined downloading, an installer for Windows users, a new Aqua theme for MacOS X users and numerous other improvements. On other XUL news, ThunderBird 0.5 was released and Lindows.com released the NVU 0.1 preview recently, a cross-platform WYSIWYG HTML editor powered by Mozilla's technologies.

The developers of the SkyOS project sat down with TechIMO to answer a few questions about the promising alternative operating system.