The new OS, still a couple of years away, will change the way developers write business applications.

"Utilities like urpmi, up2date, apt4rpm and OpenPKG may be a step in the right direction, especially if they become widely adopted. Until we have a universal tool for resolving application dependencies, we can't expect casual users to be able to install their own applications." Read the article at NewsForge.

Today, Microsoft Corp. launched Exchange Server 2003, the next edition of its messaging and collaboration server, as part of the Microsoft Office System. Novell also issued a press release stating that Novell's Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange enables users of Ximian Evolution groupware suite on Linux and UNIX desktops to function as full Microsoft Exchange 2000/2003 clients.

MandrakeSoft has recently released the latest version of their desktop operating system. Mandrake Linux 9.2 Download Edition is available on their web site across three ISO files for the Club members. The first disk is about 650megs and the following two are ~700.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Tuesday defended his company's efforts to secure its software and fend off open-source rivals.

The InfoWorld Test Center evaluates the performance of Microsoft's new 64-bit platform, assesses its usefulness for IT today, and reveals what's in store for tomorrow.

Fedora Test 3, is, most certainly, as the name says, a test. In my experience there are a few problems and a few bugs that would keep me from recommending it as an everyday desktop replacement, but nonetheless, Fedora is an Operating System (distro) worth watching out.

In the new OpenBeOS newsletter Michael Phipps is giving a good status report, explaining the status of each kit. However, what we don't learn yet is how far we are from an alpha public release. In the meantime, the Beunited Java team announced that they now have a complete coomand line version (1.4.2.) running, while 3Sat TV channel will present Yellowtab Zeta on TV today. Additionally, the people at BeOS Max said that the last version of their distribution will be 3.1, because they don't want to be an obstacle on Zeta's commercial success.

They are stronger than steel and as flexible as plastic, conduct energy better than almost any material ever discovered and can be made from unexotic raw materials such as methane gas. Read the story.

"There's a significant shift afoot in storage fundamentals, and it's not storage area networks (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS)-- although both will have critical roles in these new fundamentals. The shift involves the facilitating role that metadata will play in abstracting the specifics about data and where it's stored from the applications, end users, and operating systems requiring access to it." Read the article at ZDNews.

Sun has really shifted gears lately with regards to Solaris, SPARC, and x86. For many years, Sun seemed to relegate Solaris x86 to the status of red-headed stepchild, undeserving of attention, nurturing, and support. It furthered this perception when in January of 2002, Sun announced it would not release Solaris 9, the newest upcoming Solaris operating system, on the x86 platform. Solaris 9 was to be a (more lucrative) SPARC-only platform release.

In October 14th 1996, Matthias Ettrich announced and detailed a new project that was in search of contributers. The project was temporarily dubbed the 'Kool Desktop Environment', later to simply become the 'K Desktop Environment'. Of course, 7 years later and KDE is about to reach version 3.2, consist of 4.5 millions lines of code and represents the effort of nearly 1400 man-years.

These benchmarks are the result of a scalable network programming research. The interest in this area is to see how scalable and fast network applications can be on standard PC hardware. Linux 2.4/2.6 is compared to BSDs. Read the accompanied PDF paper here.

Libranet to ArkLinux: 'An experiment in migrating from one distro to another' can be found at TuxReports.