Hewlett-Packard is offering users of rival Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system $25,000 in free services and equipment as an incentive to switch to Linux-based HP systems. Our Take: It seems HP has decided to jump on the new hype marketing bandwagon, forsaking its own HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Tru64 UNIX in favor of Linux. This is in line with our editorial a few months ago.

A deal with BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies would allow the Windows operating system to directly control hardware. It also raises concerns over who controls the software in PCs, ZDNews claims. Elsewhere, a lawsuit faulting Microsoft for security defects in its products has added a new front in the software giant's battle against vulnerabilities in its software.

Microsoft's long-awaited launch of its Windows 2003-based Small Business Server next week is designed to cut Linux off at the knees in its SMB territory, according to company executives. On Oct. 9, the Redmond, Wash.-based company is scheduled to release two editions of Windows SBS 2003--a low-cost entry-level version and a premium edition that includes, for the first time, BizTalk Partner Edition, executives told CRN Wednesday, roughly a week before its annual partner show, Microsoft Momentum, kicks off. News.com also has a related article.

Turbolinux has announced the release of Turbolinux 10 Desktop. Skipping version 9 and inventing a term "High Windowsability" in the process, some of the notable features in Turbolinux 10 include complete Japanese support, interoperability and file sharing with Windows, and Turbo Update. Turbolinux 10 is the first distribution shipping with the new 2.6 kernel series (2.6.0-test5) as the default kernel and it also comes with KDE 3.1.3 and GNOME 2.4 desktop environments, as well as a number of commercial applications. Read all about it at DistroWatch. Also at DistroWatch check for a link for the Tectonic site which takes a brief tour of the forthcoming Ark Linux version 1.0, with screenshots.

BSDForums.org features the latest news about BSD: FreeBSD's Luigi Rizzo has made some changes to the ipfw code so it can forward packets also when acting as a bridge. Lennart Augustsson says that there's been a long standing problem with some USB printers running in bidirectional mode on NetBSD. An article by Miod Vallat describes how the m88k-specific backend of the GNU C compiler, gcc, was fixed, from the discovery and analysis of the problems to the real fixing work.

"The publicity generated by the SCO lawsuit hasn't hurt Linux distributor Red Hat's plans to expand business in Asia--in fact, it seems to have helped", said a senior executive.

CRUX Linux (simply CRUX for now on) is a source-based Linux distribution created by Per Liden, targeting advanced and intermediate users. As reported on CRUX Website, the main philosophy behind the distribution is to "keep it simple". Update: Screenshots added.

The entire GUI of SkyOS has been redesigned and re-implemented (although the result is not yet close to the much more refined mockup). To read more about some background information on SkyOS 5.0/SkyGI and take a look at new screenshots showing the new boot process and the new themeing concept, you may visit the SkyOS 5.0 preview preview page. Additionally, a new SDK is available.

This article shows how to develop a plug-in that embeds the HSQLDB pure-Java relational database server into the Eclipse Workbench. Although not as powerful as DB2 and not as popular as MySQL, HSQLDB can satisfy the needs of a wide range of Java applications, because of its extensibility and low memory/processor requirements. NewsForge also has an article about Eclipse.

From where he sits, John Sculley (ex-Apple CEO) enjoys a panoramic view of the IT landscape. Read his interview at C|Net News.com.

Ladislav Bodnar examines the package management tools in five major binary Linux distributions (Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE) and provide examples of 1) installing a package not officially supplied by the distribution itself and 2) upgrading the entire distribution to a newer version.

"Sun Microsystems crossed the line from "troubled" to "doomed" yesterday. This is sad news for the open-source community, and we need to think about how we're going to deal with it. The most pressing questions are, "What becomes of Java?" and, "What becomes of OpenOffice.org?" These are questions that matter." Read the editorial at NewsForge by Eric S. Raymond.

The world's largest embedded software company, today launched its first official support for embedded Linux. For its initial foray into the embedded Linux market, Wind River has decided to target its $4,000 visionProbe II hardware bring-up tool at embedded Linux system-level software development. Company officials say they plan a step-by-step approach toward embedded Linux, suggesting more Linux-related announcements lie ahead for the embedded software giant.

OSNews was the first news magazine to break the story on Gnome's Seth Nickell effort to replace the Init system. Soon, it became confusing to many readers as to if Seth is planning to completely replace the Init system or simply "bridge" it. We had a chat with Seth and discussed about his plans on the project (which is a personal project so far) and for Storage, an exciting project which aims to replace the traditional filesystem with a new database-based document store.