Novell last week said it plans to use newly acquired systems management tools instead of including its own ZENworks technology in a Linux software package that's due to open beta testing next month.

InfoWorld features three articles on Sun: "Sun Network: Welcome to the post-boom Sun": Company hopes to bolster its enterprise worth at next week's user conference. "Sun steals page from Microsoft's playbook": Grid, p-to-p software missing from Project Orion's official launch. "Sun inches toward low-cost computing": Company demos Oracle 10g database running on a cluster of its Intel-based servers. Also, McNealy, 48, who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, sat down last week with a group of Chronicle reporters and editors to discuss the challenges facing his company.

The BeOSJournal caught up with Vassilis Perantzakis recently in BeShare, who spoke about his work on BeOS Max Edition, his outlook on Be Inc.'s decision to "focus shift", and what he thinks is in store for future distributions of OpenBeOS, including YellowTab's Zeta. Additionally, the new french news site BeOptimistic.net features an interview of Guillaume Maillard, leader of the BlueEyedOS project. This interview is in french, but an english translation is also available. Other new BeOS-related news sites involve ZetaNews and IsComputerOn.

Once the most aggressive users of IT, financial institutions have learned to make do with less. But few can go on cost-cutting indefinitely. Computer- and telecoms-makers could soon be feasting again. In most cases, IT systems have not been touched for more than a decade - "note the antiquated OS/2 operating system that runs many an IBM computer on tellers' desks", the Economist reports.

DOpE - a windowing system for the realtime OS DROPS, which is based on the microkernel Fiasco (an implementation of the L4 API) provides the realtime facilities of DROPS at the user interface level and is now available for download via CVS. The system is now offered under the GPL, via the project's CVS.

Apple today seeded build 7B68 of Mac OS X 10.3, Panther. The update was posted to the Apple Developer Connection Web site this afternoon in three segmented disk images. The company also posted build 7B68 of the Xcode development tools.

Microsoft has suffered another legal setback in the patent dispute with software developer Eolas and is now advising developers on workarounds, as new details emerge of its plans to tweak Internet Explorer.

"The newly formed Komodo group's mandate was to provide deep support for various programming languages including Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, XSLT, as well as web standards like XML, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. It seemed only natural to support programming on both the Windows and Linux platforms." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

This is a critical review of the installation, setup and actual performance of the Mandrake distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system, version 9.1, and comes as a second part of OfB.biz's Mandrake review. (You can see part I here.) The review will cover these areas: (1) Installation and install-related setup; (2) Post-installation system administration; and (3) System performance. The review will end with a general evaluation and will assign grades on relevant areas.

"Red Hat's latest release, Red Hat 9, continues the company's tradition of producing solid offerings that are workmanlike, if not inspired. As with the past several releases, a key part of the package is the Red Hat Network, a services offering that makes maintaining errata for large installations a snap." Read the review of Red Hat Linux 9 at ServerWatch.

"Macworld Lab's first test results are in on all of Apple's new Power Mac G5 towers. We've tested all three models, and found them be clearly faster than the previous generation of Power Macs. The two single-processor models are generally as fast or faster than the top-of-the-line dual-processor 1.42GHz Power Mac G4, and the dual-processor 2GHz Power Mac G5 is clearly the reigning Mac speed king by a wide margin." Read it at MacWorld.

Patrick Volkerding announced the release of Slackware 9.1 beta-1. The changelog has all the details.

Web sites continue to be switched from Linux to Windows Server 2003 at about the same rate as in July, according to statistics compiled by Netcraft. The company said the number of active sites running on Windows Server 2003 had grown to about 185,000, an increase of 109 percent since July.

QNX Software Systems announced that Daewoo Precision Industries has selected the QNX Neutrino realtime operating system (RTOS) as the foundation for its next generation of in-car navigation systems.