Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Apple Macintosh computer.While the original Mac is certainly meager by today's standards, thereare few that would argue against its revolutionary status in the earlyyears of personal computing. In commemoration of that event, today also marks the launch of OfB MacFor.Biz, the new section of Open for Businessthat will cover the Mac in much the same way OfB covers GNU/Linux andBSD. In this premier piece, they will examine the latest Mac OS X, 10.3 "Panther," on two separate generations of Macintosh systems. Read more at MacFor.Biz.

The new Linux-based InstantOn software -- designed to help Windows XP Media Center Edition PCs boot more quickly -- is aimed at taking advantage of the power of Intel's Pentium processors, not at fixing fragmented hard drives. The software integrates into the computer's BIOS and the OS.

Twenty years ago, on January 24, 1984, Apple launched the Macintosh. The machine—which introduced the first mass-market graphical user interface, mouse and 3.5-inch floppy drive—revolutionized the computer industry and changed millions of lives. Find over at MacMinute a collection of articles and special reports on the 20th anniversary of the Mac.

Jayacard is the open source smart card operating system focused on contactless products. Some of the supported norms include ISO 7816-3/4/8, ISO 14443, ISO 15693 and x509. Current version is a cleanroom development that has been ported to some secure microprocessor under NDA ; but opensource roadmap is to have this software also freely available for flashable microprocessor like the ATmega161 from Atmel.

Desktop-Linux.net put up their own review of XandrOS Desktop 2.0 Deluxe Edition too.

Here's a review of this year's Linux World convention. It's from a frog's-eye perspective, a guy with a free "exhibitions-only" pass.

Nicholas Blachford just had a presentation posted to MorphZone. It's aimed for ex-Amiga users and people who know nothing about MorphOS so it doesn't go into technical details but lets you know the capabilities of the system and what it's all about. There's also .zip and .lha versions for download.

The text coupon ("IReadOSNews") that entitles you to freely download the LindowsOS 4.5 Developer Edition will expire today, Friday, January 23rd, at 2:00 PM Pacific Time, so you only have an hour (as I write this) to get it (you can download it later, but you need to go through the procedure of getting it before time's up). More information about the text coupon and how to use it, read our recent interview with Kevin Carmony of Lindows.com. Update: Time's up folks!

Open source advocate Bruce Perens tells BBC technology correspondent Clark Boyd why the real threat to Linux and the open source movement is not from the SCO lawsuits, but from software patents.

A federal judge on Friday said she was satisfied with Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) efforts to comply with its landmark antitrust settlement after the company announced new steps, including free access to some of its Windows operating system code. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the 2002 settlement with the government was working despite concerns from the Justice Department about one key provision.

Robert Szeleney, creator of SkyOS, was lately shopping for a new file system for his hobby OS and finally adopted the OpenBFS file system. OpenBFS was initially created for OpenBeOS and it is a re-implementation of Be's BFS. It is 64-bit, attributed and journaled, however it lacks built-in mulit-user, ACL support and other advanced security features. Robert promises changes to the file system (as opposed to a plain port) and so he now renamed his version "SkyFS". Full file system access (read/write/execute) is expected to be ready by the end of this weekend.

"After developers finished squishing more than 2,000 bugs, KDE 3.2, codenamed Rudi, is available in Beta 2, codenamed Dobra Voda (which in Czech means "good water"). What are new features of the desktop environment? Does an update make sense?" Michael 'STIBS' Stibane asks in his review.

"As never before, corporate customers are turning to Linux software instead of Microsoft Windows to run big business operations. Now, if only they could get the word processor's basic "cut and paste" feature to work." Read the rest of the article at CNN (from Reuters).

Here is an interesting review which compares SunONE WebServer and Apache/Tomcat. It can be found here (PDF) while another review is here.