"If we had to define Xandros 2.0 with one word, we'd pick "usable." This time around, the folks at Xandros have refined their product significantly and come up with something that makes Linux quite comfortable and easy to use, even if you're a total newbie to the OS." Read the article at ExtremeTech.

"For us, all of a sudden, music is the No. 1 priority of the company," Rob Schoeben, Apple's vice president of applications marketing, told Reuters. "We're trying to be a part of the music evolution overall" he said. Our Take: I wonder where that leaves Apple's Mac OS X. While Apple always was and remains a hardware company, MacOS was always at the core of the whole deal. Is the Mac OS X and Macs of the future going to serve merely as the platform to do the "music stuff that sell" instead of being the main focus of the product line? This reminds me a whole lot of Be, Inc.'s focus shift to Internet Appliances and the grandual demise of BeOS.

The Sun Microsystems Inc. has decided that the best way to compete against the growing use of commodity hardware and open-source software is to expand its own offerings in those very lines.

One of the three main German languaged Amiga print magazines has made available an AmigaOS4 preview article which includes many AmigaOS4 screenshots. Also Q&A session 26 with Amiga's CTO is now available and it was announced that IBM will hold a seminar at the upcoming AmiGBG Amiga fair in Gothenburg, Sweden.

OSDL: it's not just for data centers and carrier-grade Linux anymore. Not as of this morning, that is, when OSDL issued a press release to announce the formation of a third initiative: the Linux desktop. Newsforge article, press release, Q & A. Trolltech has also joined OSDL and will participate in the Lab's new Desktop Linux Working Group.

A Melbourne-based software outfit has come up with a tool for getting rid of the bloat on Windows systems and literally cutting one's system down to size. LitePC has developed software which it markets as XPLite and 2000lite, which users can use to remove practically any component of Windows.

Here is a quick Linux articles round up: "Analysis: Linux looks for new worlds to conquer" says ComputerWorld.au. "From back office to desktop, Linux is spreading" says ComputerWorld.au. "Novell at LinuxWorld: Ready To Rock" says Enterprise Linux IT. "Showtime for Linux" says LinuxWorld.au. "Big vendors lead leap to Linux" says ComputerWorld.au.

This major revamp of Mac OS X swaps eye-candy for speed and a compelling feature-set, says APCMag in their review.

Those who like .NET may find themselves lamenting, "I still have to deploy applications on the Windows operating system. I am still locked to one vendor - Microsoft." If this sounds like you, Ximian's Mono project might be the answer. The Mono project was started in July 2001 by Miguel de Icaza, cofounder of Ximian, with the aim of bringing the Common Language Infrastructure platform to free systems.

There's no question that the open source community has a lot going for it. Besides a staggering amount of developer power that can be turned against important problems, the open source movement also has a passion and commitment that the commercial software world often envies.

A detailed step-by-step HOWTO install NetBSD 1.6.1 on your iBook has been posted to the NetBSD port-macppc mailing list. More information about this port is available from the NetBSD/macppc website.

Onebase is still a very new distribution - the first version appeared only in July 2003, and Onebase 2004 released in early January 2004 is a major rewrite and enhancement of the original concept. It started out as a source-based system, but with this release it embraced binary packages as well, becoming a hybrid. It is not based on any other major distro or package management system, instead it prides itself on doing things its own way. These are still the early days, but this is also what makes it an interesting distro, and the one to watch.

Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds' right-hand man and the maintainer of the 2.6 kernel, will not be attending the LinuxWorld conference in New York this week, but he did speak with eWeek's Senior Editor Peter Galli about the recent 2.6 kernel release and his vision for Linux.

January's MacWorld Expo brought about several exciting hardware and software products from Apple worth getting excited about. Editorial contributor Mike Banks Valentine had the fortunate pleasure to be among those that attended the show and provided osViews with a detailed report about what was announced as well as a handful of other Apple-centric news events that occured around the same time.