NetBSD Emmanual Dreyfus says that COMPAT_DARWIN is now able to run MacOS X's XDarwin (X11). Darwin is Apple's MacOS X core. A fully functional Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc & NetBSD/i386 will imply getting MacOS X libraries to run any MacOS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes. In the meantime, a very interesting slide show was released about DragonFly, showing many aspects of the work Matthew Dillon and cia are working on.

This is a review of Suse Linux 9.0 Professional Edition at LinuxElectrons: "This software has a retail list price of $79.95. A Personal Edition is also offered for a retail list price of $39.95. Suse also provides a free, downloadable version via ftp. However, this version only contains i386 rpm's, whereas the pay versions support i586 (Intel Pentium processors and above). AMD processors are also supported as is the Athlon 64 (64 bits)."

"In an email to Red Hat Network customers, the company has announced today that it "...will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003," that "Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004," and that "Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line." This should not come as a surprise to NewsForge regulars who saw this story on October 23, but less-prepared Red Hat users seem shocked by the idea." Read the article at NewsForge.

C# is a flexible programming language with a rich set of data types. In this sample chapter, you'll learn the basics of this .NET-centric language (accompanied by instruction in an open source .NET competitor, Mono), with comparisons to other programming languages you may already be familiar with.

In nearly all secure programs, your first line of defense is to check every piece of data you receive. If you can keep malicious data from entering your program, or at least keep it from being processed, your program becomes much harder to attack. This article shows how to validate input -- one of the first lines of defense in any secure program.

Vector Linux is a distribution based on the oldest Linux distribution available today - Slackware. It comes in two flavours - a freely downloadable ISO 'lite' version (which I used for this review) and a Deluxe CD edition which can be ordered from www.vectorlinux.com. The deluxe edition includes extras such as Gnome and KDE, as well as a whole pile of extra software.

When Microsoft Corp. launches Virtual PC 2004, a Linux/BSD/Solaris/Netware version of the software won't be along for the ride—at least not officially.

New Zealand's Yoper Ltd announced the release of version 1.2 of Yoper Ydesktop V1. This release contains a large number of bugfixes and software changes.

Courtesy of GeekCruises Capt. Neil Bauman and Senior Editor of Linux Journal Doc Searles, OET brings readers an extended transcript of Linus' shipboard Q&A, where he responds to Linux dev questions on the future of Linux, including the status of Linux 2.6, impacts from increasing corporate (and vendor) adoption, an ever-growing kernel, and even on the pending lawsuit from SCO.

"There are loads of things to consider when buying a PC or a Mac, things like API’s, software and hardware support, networking capabilities, usability and security then you have the major one, the price. You also have to consider that Mac’s are certainly aimed at the consumer market while Windows is aiming for both Consumer and Business users". Read the comparison at ActiveMac.

FreeBSD's John Baldwin says he will be committing some very significant changes to the i386 interrupt and SMP code for FreeBSD. Some new features include runtime selection of using the I/O APICs or the AT PICs to route interrupts; SMP can now be enabled in GENERIC kernel and the SMP kernel config is no longer necessary. His new code can largely be pulled over to amd64 to support APICs and SMP based on that architecture.

The same protocols that make secure e-commerce over traditional wired networks possible can also help make wireless transactions safe. This article demonstrate secure messaging between J2ME clients and server-side Java applications using the Kerberos protocol.

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.