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.

Here is a detailed introduction to FreeBSD especially geared for current Linux users.

Intel and Microsoft on Tuesday released software designed to improve the performance of Windows applications designed for 32-bit processors when they are running on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processors. Download it here.

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.

Microsoft plans to broaden its stake on Linux and Unix systems this week by giving away a set of tools for migrating applications to Windows.

theKompany.com announced the availability of BlackAdder 1.0-040112, a Windows/Linux UI development environment for Python based on Qt. BlackAdder combines a visual design environment with debugging, syntax highlighting, ODBC interfaces and extensive documentation into a comprehensive platform for developing Python applications with PyQt.

"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.

TechIMO has published the first preview of the next-generation SkyOS platform. With the new beta program gearing up, this article may provide some insight into what features one can expect when testing SkyOS 5. Many screenshots included. Ever busy with improvements, Robert and the SkyOS team have added the following to SkyOS 5:

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).

For all the talk of Linux sidelining Windows in the server market, the upstart Linux operating system instead has stolen more glory from the older Unix as buyers flock to cheaper systems. But Unix vendors, even those that have embraced Linux, aren't giving up on the old workhorse. They're touting Unix as a complement, and in some cases a grown-up alternative, to Linux on low-cost machines.

Netcraft has published the second half of 2003's Top 10 hosting providers survey and list which Operating Systems they use for reliability. Seven providers use FreeBSD, one Windows and one Linux.

The GTK# toolkit 0.15 is out and Miguel de Icaza is providing news on Mono.

According to Tablet PC Talk Microsoft has announced at CES that they will release a beta copy of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004 (Lonestar) upgrade in March 2004.

Red Hat today announced that it would assign all of its copyrights in the eCos open source operating system to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The contribution will enable the Free Software Foundation to act as the sole copyright steward of the project and work directly with the eCos community and its maintainers on future development.