This series of three articles helps the developers involved in the tedious process of migrating/porting the OS/2 system drivers and applications to Linux. It provides a one-to-one mapping of various OS/2-to-Linux calls related to threads, IPC, memory management, timer handling, file handling, and so on. In addition, it captures the various preprocessor directives and compiler/linker options that can be mapped from OS/2 to Linux.

The Torrent files are out now for Mandrake Linux 10 RC1, while MandrakeSoft announced that they are reverting back to XFree86 4.3 because of the recent licensing change for XFree86 4.4.

A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin "Mason" Merz has been revealed (not all icons shown in the shot are the new ones though). Also Q&A session 27 with Amiga's CTO Fleecy Moss is now available. Hyperion, Eyetech, AmigaWorld.net and many more exhibitors will attend the upcoming AmiGBG fair in Sweden.

With the hype growing to a feverish pitch about the public announcement of Xen, I thought I would share some insight into the knowledge I've had of the language for almost a year and a half. I'm still under orders not to post the video demonstration I have back to my blog (not because the subject matter is Xen, but because apparently the demonstration is internal to Microsoft... I still don't understand this (expecially now that the cat is out of the bag), but it certainly doesn't stop me from sharing some of the information contained in it. This will be an ongoing post as the demonstration is over an hour long, with lots of code samples to boot.

Which Linux distribution is the most popular? For many players in the open source realm, that answer depends on which part of the globe is counting, and how. By most accounts and research metrics, Red Hat (Quote, Chart) is the current market leader in distributions. IDC, for example, estimates that Red Hat's distributions cover over 60 percent of the Linux server market.

"I got my new iBook a couple of days ago, and finally tried this “Mac OS X” thing for the first time. After doing all the software updates, this is what I found." Well-known usability hacker Mattew Thomas (mostly of Mozilla fame) gives his two cents on Mac OS X.

"Every couple of years, Sun Microsystems kicks off a 'new version of Solaris' celebration. This Unix fiesta, if you will, requires several months of marketing hype before the actual operating system is released. And so the party began this week with Sun's plugs for Solaris 10, which should arrive in the second half of 2004." Read the report at TheRegister.

The first and second articles in this series about .NET security covered the basics of .NET identity-based security, and showed you how to implement custom authentication and authorization schemes. In this last installment, you get the missing piece of the puzzle: Learn how to implement identity flow and identity impersonation across.NET-distributed multilayered applications.

Slashdot reports that a post to Bugtraq from SecurityTracker.com reports an Internet Explorer 5 exploit that has been released based on the Win2K code leak: "It is reported that a remote user can create a specially crafted bitmap file that, when loaded by IE, will trigger an integer overflow and execute arbitrary code." Elsewhere, this is a quick, superficial look at the style and content of the leaked Windows 2000 source, quoting from the comments but not the code, so this should be safe for developers to read.

SkyOS is now able to handle and display text from all languages. Because of the recently introduced keyboard/UNICODE mapping and UTF8 handling in the entire GUI and applications you can type and view text from languages like English, German, Chinese and more. Check the news & shots here.

New to Java? If you've gotten past the "Hello World" stage, this chapter from "Just Java 2" will help you understand Java application structure, the runtime internals (stack and heap), and the class "object."

"After using LindowsOS for some time, many troublesome issues regarding the future of this particular flavour of Linux continually flood my mind whenever the subject of Lindows surfaces. I've followed both the company and its flagship product, LindowsOS, since its introduction over two years ago." Read the review at DesktopOS.

"XandrosOS is a good-looking, Debian-based Linux distro designed to lure Windows XP users. It's exceptionally easy to install and use, has good hardware and peripheral detection and good multimedia support, offers Windows networking compatibility, saves one money -- and the desktop, a tweaked version of KDE, even looks like XP to boot." Read the review at TheRegister.

It's easy to get lost in the world of "little languages" -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages.