"Mike Benoit recently posted a link to results from his new and improved file system shootout, using better hardware and running more tests. Using two benchmarks that are designed to measure hard drive and file system performance, Bonnie++ and IOZone, he's compared a number journaling filesystems found in the 2.6 kernel." Read the report at KernelTrap and the actual benchmarks here.

iGeek has some interesting essays on Panther's user interface and features, including a review of the highly-regarded Expose. Other articles include "Panes and Eye Cues"and Multi-Users and Panther.

Longhorn PDC 4051 (6.0.4051.0) is expected to be given to PDC's attendees on Monday, but FlexBeta has some screenshots already.

Here comes the 9th test release of Linux 2.6.0 and looking good with Linus Torvalds saying he's pleased with all developments since test7 and that the stability freeze was a good move. New features include Serial-ATA support and XFS fixes.

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 Darwin team announced the availability of the source code for Darwin 7.0. These sources correspond to Mac OS X 10.3, and are available via the web. Also, the CVS repository has been updated for gcc, gdb, cups, efax, gimp-print, tcl, Rendezvous, StreamingServer, and HeaderDoc.

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.

SharpDevelop is an open-source (GPL) IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on the .NET platform (Mono port in the works). This 0.98 release has seen a complete rewrite of the text editor (it is now much faster), which also should be now much easier reuseable as a control in other applications. Also new by (very) popular request is the Tools/Options/Text Editor- Highlighting panel. It allows you to modify the syntax highlighting that is used inside #develop.

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.

LLVM is a new infrastructure designed for compile-time, link-time, runtime, and "idle-time" optimization of programs from arbitrary programming languages. LLVM is written in C++ and has been developed over the past 3 years at the University of Illinois. It currently supports compilation of C and C++ programs, using front-ends derived from GCC 3.4. New front-ends are being written for Java bytecode and CAML.

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).

FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 is now available for testing from here. Mirrors to be synced shortly.

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.

This set of documentation describes the new features of the C# language, including Generics, Anonymous Methods and Partial Types. Please note that this is a draft document intended to give you a preview of the "Whidbey" release of the C# language. Additionally, InfoWorld features an article which discusses the missing .NET implementation for Itanium.