"Sun Microsystems' Solaris will become the third operating system to take advantage of Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processor. Solaris, Sun's version of Unix, already runs on 32-bit "x86" processors including AMD's Athlon and Intel's Xeon. But Sun also will release a version in 2004 that will take advantage of the 64-bit extensions that make Opteron different from those other chips, Sun software chief Jonathan Schwartz told reporters in a meeting here Thursday." Read more at ZDNet.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said it is working through ECMA International, the Geneva-based standards organization, to push the development of a standard set of language extensions that will create a binding between the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard C++ programming language and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major free BSD variants. Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz.

It arrived in the mail today: the Java Desktop System beta, in the form of a live CD, based on SuSE's 8.2 live evaluation CD. I was eager to try Sun's attempt at creating a user-friendly Linux distribution, so I signed up for beta-testing, and this live-CD is the result.

On the heels of its landmark Sun Java Enterprise System announcements, Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced more than 300,000 registered licenses of the Solaris 9 Operating System (x86 Platform Edition). This volume attests to a surge in customer demand for the secure, reliable and highly performant Solaris OS on a variety of x86 systems, setting the foundation for continued growth and interest in Sun's Java Enterprise System. Read more for the rest of the press release.

Scott Long released the March-Sepetember 2003 Status report, reviewing the past seven months of FreeBSD development. The paper is loaded with updates covering Bluetooth, ACPI, dynamically linked /bin, icc support, cryptographic support, java, KSE, porting OpenBSD's pf, and much more. Elsewhere, this paper describes an automated system for building and distributing binary security updates for FreeBSD, and describes the challenges encountered.

Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company's Internet Explorer browser, but they can't seem to spark a flame. Elsewhere, Eolas Technologies, which has the rights to a browser plug-in patent, has filed a motion to permanently stop Microsoft distributing Internet Explorer browsers that infringe the patent.

A few days ago an Amiga event took place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Here are some reports of this event (1 , 2). Furthermore the new ITX AmigaOne board will be shown at various Australian AmigaOS4 events and also it is now confirmed that the OS will support Blizzard PPC cards in addition to the AmigaOne and Cyberstorm cards.

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems.

YellowTAB provided us with a copy of Zeta 1.0 RC-1pre+ plus a few additional patches that were not available at the CD's press time. We installed and tried out this new version and here's what we think.

The purpose of this review is to provide some additional exposure to source-based Linux distributions in general, and Sorcerer in particular. We've been using Sorcerer where I work since January of this year and have been completely satisfied with the experience. Hopefully this review will give you a good idea of why we use Sorcerer, and it may move you to try it yourself. I'm no systems adminstrator, so if I can install and work with Sorcerer, most people with a little Linux experience will be able to also.

"Slackware has always been a developer's or advanced user's product. It has simplicity and speed. However, it lacks some of the tools the commercial applications have for administration. So you'll need an intermediate level of skill for this, particularly working with shell scripts to customize your boot configuration." Read the article at Linux-Universe. Here is our review with screenshots.

After two release candidates it is released the final version of Vector Linux-4.0. This release is based on Slackware 9.0 and the 2.4.22 kernel. It comes with auto hardware configuration and enough desktop software. The Deluxe version includes more software, KDE and Gnome.

Justin writes "Gamespy's latest Peripheral Visions newsletter takes a look at the latest Lindows release from the gamer's standpoint." You can read the rest here.