The KDE 3.2 Beta 2 User Review

KDE 104 Comments
Around 3 weeks ago, I downloaded the 2nd beta of KDE 3.2 from their FTP site. I've been using this release every day since then. The purpose of my writing this piece is not to highlight KDE 3.2's new features and applications - read the Changelog at KDE's site for that - but to give you a complete picture of how it measures up to its previous versions in terms of everyday use. Does it make me more productive? Is the command line more efficient yet? Or, even better, does it make me use the command line more effectively? Read on...
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Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 45-day Free Trial Edition

OS News 29 Comments
Virtual PC is a powerful software virtualization solution that allows you to run multiple PC-based operating systems simultaneously on one workstation, providing a safety net to maintain compatibility with legacy applications while you migrate to a new operating system. It also saves reconfiguration time, so your support, development, and training staff can work more efficiently. This is a 45-day time-out, full version of the Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 product. No serial number is required.
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IM With File System Support: Putting the BFS Attributes in Good Use

  Submitted by Bruno G. Albuquerque Haiku 49 Comments
The IM Kit is a modular framework developed to make it easy to access various IM networks (ICQ, AIM, etc) and is designed in a way it is fully integrated with BeOS's attributed journaled 64-bit file system. It makes use of BFS' attributes, indexes and "live queries" to make it as flexible as possible. With the IM Kit you can, for instance, search for all members of your family that are online and that by using the standard "Find" utility that you use to search files on your disk. You can also manage all the contacts using Tracker (the BeOS file manager and desktop). You can also see in the screenshot that the IM Kit even changes the icon color according to the user status and that change is, as expected, live.
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Xandros 2.0 – An end to Windows? An adventure in Open source

Oracle and SUN 60 Comments
I'm a windows user by nature, I've been playing around with Linux for a little while, I'm no Expert in any way but I've used quite a few distro's. The first distro I ever stuck with for any amount of time Was Xandros 1.0, which a friend provided for me. Except for the fact that it ran an old version of KDE it was perfect for me, but the old KDE crippled my work. Enter Xandros 2.0.
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Richard Stallman on 20 years of GNU

  Submitted by Matt Whipp Open Source 47 Comments
Last week saw the 20th anniversary of Richard Stallman's decision to quit the MIT and start the GNU Project in 1984, with a goal to creating a platform using 'free' software that a user can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve: the GNU operating system which used widely today in its GNU/Linux form. A year later he founded the Free Software Foundation, a body that seeks to further the development and use of free software. He is also the author of the GNU General Public Licence, the licence under which free software can be distributed. Read his interview with Matt Whipp at PCPro.
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Book Review: Spidering Hacks

Office 5 Comments
"Spidering Hacks" by O'Reilly is targeted at everyone who wants to automate surfing the web and has a little bit of programming experience. Though each of the hacks in the book covers a particular topic, similar to books in the Cookbook series, there is also a lot of material that is generally applicable in each of them.
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BeOS/Zeta on VPC 2004, 1 GB RAM Hack, Opera for 10 USD

Zeta 36 Comments
ZetaNews.com posted some interesting all-around BeOS/Zeta news today: Opera 3.64 for BeOS now available for $10 USD, BeOSmax.org are explaining why the newest version is further delayed, an article about installing BeOS inside Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and a hack effort to make BeOS believe that the machine has less RAM than it actually has in order to not hit its 1 GB RAM limitation and crash.
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New Release of Minix?

  Submitted by DanO OS News 27 Comments
On November 23 a new relase of Minix sneaked out. To make things a bit more interesting it looks like there may well be more releases to come: "Version 2.0.4 has been slapped together in a hurry to have a fixed point to start a new Minix project at. The code should be OK, but most new things haven't been tested. (So there's already a fix out.) The documentation is alas far behind all the changes." A Bochs image is also available (in the i386/DOSMINIX.ZIP, use the minix.bxrc to start Bochs).
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