LinuxElectrons.com is reviewing Red Hat's Fedora Test-3. Screenshots included.

SuSE has updated their site with features of the new SuSE Linux 9.0. Additionally, they released a Live CD based on the 9.0 version (it's the RC-1). Mirrors here.

NetBSD's Steve Woodford announces that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. NetBSD/arm is a collective term for NetBSD running on systems based on ARM Ltd's ARM architecture. Also, NetBSD's Frank van der Linden announced that he has added gdb support to the tree, as a result the NetBSD/amd64 port is now completely crossbuildable. NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors.

An excellent feature has just been committed to OpenBSD-current : pfsync and now CARP. OpenBSD now adds high availability to security. In the meantime, the OpenBSD 3.4 CDs have begin to ship.

The team that brought RISC OS Aemulor has another killer app this autumn for the Risc OS users - Cino: The Iyonix DVD player. Read more Risc OS news at Drobe and IconBar.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released 2.6.0-test8. He listed the most noticeable changes as fixes for: the '/proc/PID/stat' oops, the Athlong prefetch bug causing occasional spurious page faults, serverworks PIO autotuning, cpufreguency calculations and NFS O_DIRECT. Read the changelog at KernelTrap.

GCC 3.3.2 includes numerous new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Grab it here. Additionally, this interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform.

BareFeats has compiled the results of a comparative test utilizing Cinebenc, the best cross-platform benchmarking application the market has to offer.It is interesting to see how the MP 2GHz Opteron and Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz MT compared against the MP 2GHz G5. Here is also a previous benchmark session at Barefeats which was updated recently.

Just three days after a Microsoft vice president--who is in charge of Microsoft.com and Windows Update--told thousands of delegates at a conference in Florida that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP would be available by the end of 2003, the company has effectively retracted the comments and said that customers will see only a beta version of SP2 this year. In the meantime, Microsoft debuts first Windows XP Security Pack.

There's a review of FreeBSD 5.1 at The Jem Report. It's a comprehensive review and offers a quick comparison with GNU/Linux.

Apple's iTunes 4.1.0.52 for Windows was released today. I downloaded it a few hours ago, and so here are my first impressions on the product. Screenshots included.

" I learned about Dropline Gnome, an optimized Gnome installation for Slackware. Anyway, the upshot was that my Gnome system was upgraded, my personal settings were retained but my Open Office file associations were broken. I could no longer open documents in Nautilus with an Open Office application." Read the tutorial at Linux-Universe.

The GNU/Fiwix project began during the summer of 1997. In fact, even before than I had running around my head the idea to design and implement a new UNIX-like operating system. But it was not until 1997 that it started to become a reality.

All applications which were used to configure settings like graphic, audio, themes, network, devices, keyboard etc. on SkyOS were rewritten as DLLs and are accessible through one application now: the System manager. Check here for two screenshots too.