Here's a review of the new FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. A few new improvements were made to the kernel and several to the userland, and of course there was a bug or two. If you're looking for an AMD64 operating system, FreeBSD 5.2 might be for you.

Business Linux desktop announcements are continuing to come fast and furious at LinuxWorld here, the latest coming from Xandros Inc. with its unveiling of the "Xandros Business Desktop Operating System".

Lately, a lot of activity is going on in Linux circles. Novell has become a leading Linux distro vendor, Redhat has raised $600 million in a bond offering, and SCO is making news every day. The article "IBM's Linux Consolidation Plan" is Latif's analysis of the consolidation going on behind the scenes.

ExtremeTech continues its journey into Linux distro reviews. Today is Ark Linux's turn.

Intel has confirmed that its 'Prescott' processor features a longer instruction pipeline than the current desktop Pentium 4. The announcement lends weight to media claims that the chip will run more slowly than its predecessor. In the meantime, you can see why Apple waited for the 90nm version of the PowerPC 970 before launching a G5-based Xserve 1U rackmount server: the latter's heat dissipation characteristics.

soup4you2 writes "A cluster is used to make a collection of 2 or more computers run as a single super computer. Clusters can be used to increase reliability and/or increase performance and resources available. A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical PC computers that are networked together into a TCP/IP LAN, and have libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them."

Recently hired by Ximian (now a subsidiary of Novell) in order to further improve the Linux kernel, Robert Love has interesting tasks ahead of him—integration of all this low level work into the Linux desktop, specifically the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform. The work is already coming to fruition as developer releases of "Project Utopia" (as it's been dubbed) have already been released. So sit back and let's see how Robert Love plans to make the Linux Desktop "Just Work".

SuSE has always been one of our favorite Linux distributions and this release is no disappointment. It fine-tunes SuSE's offering and bundles a lot of value into one package. Experienced Linux users will appreciate the powerful bundled tools, while newbies will like the ease of use and stress-free installation. This version comes with five CDs, a DVD, and both user's and administrator's guides.

Slashdot's Pudge reviews the Server version of Mac OS X Panther 10.3. Second part tomorrow.

Rumors were that Microsoft had shelved its fledgling X# programming language. Instead, the company is forging ahead with it.

As many of you may remember I did a review of Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 (SFU) a few months ago. I remember being frustrated with that release because it seemed to me that all Microsoft did was throw something together just to be able to say "Hey look, we have this". I thought, since Microsoft released version 3.5, I would revisit and see what changes were done with it. I downloaded the beta version a while back and from the beta I was very impressed with the improvements that Microsoft made. Being a beta version it was buggy and some things just didnt quite work. I finally got the final version of the OpenBSD-based SFU 3.5 and this release makes dynamic leaps and bounds over previous releases of this software package. I am glad to see a lot more work was put into this release.

This is the third in a series of reviews of Debian-based distributions. The first review looked at LindowsOS 4.5. The second examined newcomer MEPIS Linux. This time it's all about Xandros, one of the oldest of the commercial Debian-based distributions. Since its release last month, Xandros 2.0 has been garnering rave reviews. To learn why it didn't earn another at NewsForge, keep reading.

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo began this morning at the Javits Center in New York City with a keynote address by Jack Messman, chairman of the board and CEO of Novell. Novell, Messman noted, is a billion-dollar company that's wagering its future on open source, with the acquisitions in the past year of Ximian and SuSE. Linux convert Novell proclaimed its strong support for open-source programming Wednesday, but made the case for a pragmatic approach that blends in its own proprietary applications.

Even though most Linux users have treated Linux as an operating system for their x86 white boxes, Linux runs equally well on PowerPC machines. David Mertz, Ph.D. looks at Linux on the PowerPC and the appealing range of PPC machines produced by Apple, where the option of using Linux is of great value to many users. Update: IBM pushes Linux on Power processors.