September 16, 2003 marked the dawn of a new era for SkyOS. After the UI design contest poll was closed and the SkyOS design team and lead developer cast their votes, a winner was chosen: a very forward-looking and professional design dubbed Wind UI.

ITRON, the first in a series of open-source specifications for the TRON architecture, answered a pressing need for Japan's electronics firms, which traditionally have written their own software for embedded systems. Read the article at LinuxInsider.

Microsoft said Wednesday that it has made available a test version of its Windows Server 2003 operating system that runs on 64-bit chips from AMD.

Bill Gates yesterday confirmed that there is no official release date yet for the next version of Windows, named Longhorn. "Longhorn could be 2005 or 2006," Gates told a small group of journalists yesterday at the TechNet/MSDN seminar in The Hague. "This release is going to be driven by technology, not by a release date. Which probably means it is going to be late." In the meantime, tThe second Windows XP service pack will include a number of changes designed to allay security fears.

Many users submitted the news of the myriad Mozilla releases, including Mozilla 1.5, Firebird 0.7, and Thunderbird 0.3. In other news, Opera 7.21 for Windows, Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD was released this week as well. Update: Epiphany 1.0.3 is out too.

Well, you know... little girls & boys admire athletes, singers, actors... We, OS geeks, tend to respect and admire engineers (for the most part). Come in and vote for your favorite tech icon, let us see who is the "big tech star" these days!

Today's microprocessors will become extinct by the end of the decade, to be replaced by computers built onto a single chip, Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos said Tuesday.

Here are some shots of Fedora Test 3 which was released yesterday.

The SimplyGNUstep project was started a little over two years ago. It's goal was to create a pure GNUstep based user oriented desktop operating system. It used the Linux kernel and the standard GNU software, but it was not like any other standard Linux distribution.

Mandrake Linux, has just hit the street in an all new version 9.2 (codename: FiveStar). This new version is based on Linux version 2.4.22 (an optional Linux 2.6.0pre is also available and included), XFree86 4.3, binaries built upon GCC 3.3.1, Apache 2.0.43, KDE 3.1.3, Gnome 2.4.0, OpenOffice 1.1 and more.

"Apple Power Macs did well on Photoshop, but the 64-bit AMD-based systems won handily on most tests", says PCWorld.

In the world of "free" open source software, there is no greater villain than SCO, owner of the Unix operating system. But the spread of Linux could be hurt by another group--and ironically, it's the free-software proponents themselves, Forbes says.

Earlier in the month we made a call for contributions, and we had an overwhelming response. Hopefully we'll be seeing some new articles from OSNews readers in the near future. I'd like to announce that we've set up a mailing list for those readers who might be interested in contributing articles and reviews. I'd also like to make a public apology to those people who I mistakenly added to the list. "Read more" for details.

After years of backing only one format in the recordable DVD format war, Apple Computer is adding limited support of a rival format into its operating system.