The PDF-based Beyond Magazine issue 2 is out, an interesting weekend reading. It includes articles about the *BSD, Rebol, Amiga, Games and old platforms, multimedia, an interview with Scot Hacker (author of "BeOS Bible", today an OSX user), Linux, OpenBeOS, a review of BeOS Max Edition 3.0 and more. Additionally, the German Technoids issue #3 is out too.

All Apple Stores nationwide last night re-opened their doors at 8 PM for their queued Apple fans to enter. OSNews was present, so check inside for a write up of the event and some pictures.

The Slackware-based VectorLinux receives a review from MadPenguin. Read it here.

Fink 0.6.0 was released yesterday and is compatible with Panther. This is a source-only release; binaries will follow in a few days. Changes include: 10.2 with gcc 3.1 is officially no longer supported. 10.2-gcc3.3 and 10.3 are officially supported now, even though not all packages are in the 10.3 or 10.2-gcc3.3 tree yet. The mirror code has been updated to support the mirrors finkmirrors.net will introduce. Additionally, Fink now has a new logo.

DirectX has been providing game developers with a great platform for rich and fast-paced games on Windows for many years. As these platform technologies advance to embrace the concepts of "Managed" programming, DirectX rises to meet the challenge head on.

Today, Ian Murdock described his recent work on APT to the Debian community. This announcement has far-ranging implications for the future of Fedora and Debian projects. Ars Technica has the details.

Qt 3.2.2 is a bugfix release and was released a few days ago. It maintains both forward and backward compatibility (source and binary) with Qt 3.2.1.

The first stop in GTK+'s roadmap to GTK 2.4 is the unstable release of GTK+, Glib 2.3.0 and Pango 1.3.0. It includes a work-in-progress of the new File Selector (screenshot).

O'Reilly posted four interesting Mac dev articles on MacDevCenter: "Ten Things I Dig About Xcode", "Creating Easy-to-Deploy Unix Applications for OS X", "Start Me Up: Writing and Understanding OS X StartupItems" and "Programming REALbasic, Part 1: Syntax of the Language".

WinNetMag reports that in November Microsoft is planning to release for a small fee (usually it's $20) a first public beta of Longhorn. MSDN members will get it for free in December. The report states that the first pre-beta won't feature the new Aero UI.

SciTech has announced an agreement with ATI, which will enable advanced multi-OS (Linux X11, Qt/Embedded, OS/2, Athene, Amiga, SMX, and more) support for ATI's mobile, desktop and embedded visual processors in future versions of SciTech SNAP Graphics IES and ENT versions.

Panther will be released tonight and people already started the queues outside the Apple Stores in US. OSNews will be present tonight at Palo Alto's store reporting, as we did last year. Many sites online present Panther today: "A Developer's Look at Panther", "Xcode: The future of Mac development tools", "Take a Peek at Panther: See what Apple's latest OS can do for you", "New OS to go on sale tonight; fourth upgrade in 2.5 years", "Panther Server: 'Open source made easy'", "Panther: A look at the new Mac OS", while XvsXP has being updated shooting out WinXP and OSX. Update: Two more: "Apple Panther Aims at Enterprise Compatibility" and "Apple's Panther OS: Is This the One?"

Just a couple of weeks into a new release, Mandrake Linux 9.2 users have encountered all sorts of problems. First, it was the problem of the missing kernel-source from the original ISO's as reported on the Mandrake Club site, then it was a slew of a major bugfix set of patches, including fixes to KDE and the kernel, and now reports are surfacing on Cooker (and which has been confirmed on Mandrake's site that Mandrake Linux 9.2 is killing some cdroms made by LG Electronics.

"If we were to re-write Linux, taking clues from various operating systems, what would we make sure it did? Our next-generation operating system (NGOS) would be completely modular in design, aimed at 64-bit hardware, and with an interface that would change the way people compute. It would support a large number of applications and hardware devices, accepting device drivers written for other operating system, and run applications written for other operating system under an emulation mode." Read the editorial at NewsForge.