In light to the announcement of Qt Phone Edition running on top of Linux, here is some related news: The new issue of LinuxGazette is discussing Linux as an embedded RTOS: "A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system capable of guaranteeing timing requirements of the processes under its control. While a time-sharing OS like UNIX strives to provide good average performance, for a RTOS, correct timing is the key feature."

Robert Watson posted another bi-weekly version of the FreeBSD 5.2 open issues list, slightly restructured. At this time, there are four "show stopper defects" listed: panics when building ata-raid arrays, ATAng crashdump causes disk corruption, pipe/VM corruption on Alpha, and lingering PSE instability. There are only 5 issues left of on the "required features" list: KSE support for sparc64, KSE support for alpha, Fine-grained network stack locking without Giant, MAC framework devfs path fixes, and ACL_MASK override of umask support in UFS.

Lycoris has released the download edition of Update 3, their third major version of their distro. Paying customers had access to it a month ago. Currently, not all mirrors are rsynced while the dev tools CD and source code haven't being uploaded as of yet.

Mozilla 1.6a, the next alpha release from the "classic" codebase was announced at mozilla.org recently. The mail app now has vCard support, "remove from server after x days" and the (much requested) option of separate recipient and sender columns in the thread pane. Check out the Changelog to see a list of the other new features/fixes.

How did we get from there to here? The history of computing is marked by ages. In each age, the basic design of how we work with computers changes. Many people probably think we're in the brave new Internet age at this time, but considering the nature of computing, we're likely just at an intermediary stage. We're just now peeking into the next age -- the age of the truly distributed computing system --the coming of the grid.

There's been much discussion over the past few months about the marriage of databases and filesystems - with Microsoft's Longhorn reportedly sporting the Yukon integrated SQL Server, and GNOME Storage in heaty debate, if not development, there's been lots to talk about.

Technically, the BSD operating systems are every bit as good as Linux, so why aren't they commercially successful? eWEEK.com Linux & Open Source Center Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and software consultant Brian Masinick explain why.

In one of the most overlooked cool things at the PDC, the new Command Shell that will be in Longhorn blew me away when I saw it. I walked up to the booth asking if unix-like file aliases would be in the new shell, and was given a demo by the team that had my mind racing." Read the article at ASP.net.

With Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Microsoft is introducing a set of security technologies that will improve Windows XP-based computers' ability to withstand malicious attacks from viruses and worms. The technologies include: Network protection, Memory protection, Safer email, Safer browsing. This paper discusses the first two elements on this list.

Users who are technically self-supporting and don't want to pay Red Hat for service and support could deploy Debian, says Open Source Development Lab analyst Stacey Quandt, "and it would lead to greater return on investment."

SuSE Linux, until now known mainly as 'that European flavor of Linux' with many Americans, is getting ready for a big push with businesses and government organizations, with the introduction of SuSE Linux 9 with 64-bit processing and 2.6 kernel enhancements to the Americas Thursday.

Some time ago we featured an interview with an... official Mac OS X switcher. A year later, we found another Apple switcher, James Dorn ("noviteo" for his friends) and we ask him a few details upon the switch. Especially with the recent price cuts on Apple hardware and the Mac OS X Panther release last week, being a switcher becomes "cool" all over again.

Free UNIX-derived operating systems have traditionally have a simplistic approach to process synchronization which is unsuited to multiprocessor application. Initial FreeBSD SMP support kept this approach by allowing only one process to run in kernel mode at any time, and also blocked interrupts across multiple processors, causing seriously suboptimal performance of I/O bound systems. This paper describes the work done to remove this bottleneck, paying particular attention to the project management aspects and the particular challenges of a large open source development project.

Microsoft's pre-beta version of its Visual Studio .NET platform, "Whidbey", is offering a trove of new simplified tools and features that should make developers jobs easier, while giving Microsoft critics new fodder, attendees at the Professional Developers Conference here said. In the meantime, Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap 2004-2005 were posted, and also the new CLR Profiler which allows developers to see the allocation profile of their manage applications.