Several hours ago, the FreeBSD team quietly released FreeBSD 4.9, the next version in the 4.x stable series. It features support for a number of new NICs, an improved ipfw, PAE support (allowing up to 64GB of RAM) and numerous other enhancements. Desktop users will be pleased to know that GNOME 2.4 and KDE 3.1.4 are included. Changelog here, mirrors here.

NeoWin put together lots of interesting links to videos, screenshots and articles of all the happenings in the PDC this week. In some of the screenshots and video you will see the new hardware accelerated Aero UI. Also, a demonstration of WinFS featured a method to "stack" documents by author in a window, with the heights of the stacks corresponding to the number of documents. Apple also works in something similar reportedly (Apple calls them "piles").

In its lawsuit against IBM, the SCO Group has begun a direct challenge to the General Public License--the legal foundation for Linux, numerous other open-source programming projects and software SCO still ships today.

Seifried writes "Changes in Red Hat Inc.'s business focus and support policies have forced me (and I assume many other administrators) to evaluate our options for the Linux operating system. Fortunately we do have choices, and ultimately can stick with Linux even if it isn't Red Hat Linux."

Everyone knows of Mac OS X's Finder file manager, but not many know of a third party file manager by CocoaTech called Path Finder. Path Finder is one of the most interesting products that I have come across lately. It's a file manager, but with a lot of extras. It can reside happily next to Finder, or it can replace it completely, drawing its own desktop, by unloading the Finder altogether.

"In an ideal world, whenever a program cannot perform a function it exits with a useful error message, giving you enough clues to fix the problem. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world -- at least, not all the time. Sometimes when an application encounters an error, you are none the wiser." Read the article at DevChannel.org by Gerard Beekmans.

There's a brand new SuSE Linux 9.0 PRO review on the UnixReview site.

OpenQNX reports that Julian (a.k.a. Kinners) has ported GTK2 and family to QNX6. You can find them in his repository here. This GTK2 port uses XFree86 4.3 for QNX.

ActiveState today announced the release of Visual XSLT 2.0 at the Microsoft PDC. Visual XSLT 2.0 addresses customer's demands for a flexible debugger and a Visual Schema Mapper. The Just-In-Time de-bugger doesn't need source code and automatically senses and debugs code; it is the first of its kind for XSLT. The solution also includes a Visual Schema Mapper that has "drag and drop" functionality.

In this article, the author will cover both the client and server side as he describes how to create non-blocking secure connections using the Java Secure Socket Extensions (JSSE) and the Java NIO (new I/O) library, and he will explain the traditional approach to creating a non-blocking socket, as well as an alternative (and necessary) method if you want to use JSSE with NIO.

Just a few days after the report that Mandrake 9.2 can fry some LG cdroms (workaround has being issued in the Linux kernel in the meantime), now users complain that Mac OS X Panther renders unusable/fried firewire hard drives, mostly some LaCie models and models that are both USB and FW. In the meantime, MacSlash has posted a collection of bugs found on Panther here and here, while backwards compatibility with Jaguar seems to not be great either. Hopefully 10.3.1 is not too far away!

PCBurn.com has a review up on Vector Linux's latest release, 4.0. Find out what this slimmed-down Linux distribution has to offer.

Cygwin is latest contributor on XFree86.org that gets pushed away by the behavior of some of its founding members and the dysfunctionality of XFree86.org. Hopefully, Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, Apple, Sun and others will create a fork (or join Xouvert, X2 or a more 'open' X11.org) in a way that allows truly open development and innovation in X in a faster pace than XFree86's maintainers have allowed so far.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Monday plans to discuss the company's strategy to generate interest--and dollars--from an avalanche of Windows-oriented products over the next three years. Read the reports at News.com, eWEEK and Y!News.