Opera released v6.02 for the Mac, while promises version 7 soon. Opera Software also released version 7.11 for Linux recently. In other browser news, Gecko-based Epiphany, released version 0.6.1.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Additionally, FreeBSD team's Hiten Pandya has written a manual page for the Asynchronous Logging Queues (ALQ) for FreeBSD 5.x and is requesting your comments and reviews.

"Earlier this year Red Hat split its range into two segments - effectively, business and everything else. It did this in the wrong order, as The Register remarked at the time, but subsequently the company has padded out its Enterprise range to consist of Advanced Server, Enterprise Server and Workstation, so here at least it has a complete set." Read the article at The Register.

HP hoisted its Superdome-Itanium-Windows combination to the top of the premier OLTP scalability benchmark on Tuesday, about a month after originally gaining the top spot and little more than a week after IBM displaced the combo with a system based on its own AIX/RISC/DB2 stack. Also, Microsoft gained ground on its database rivals in 2002, despite a decline in sales for the market as a whole, according to research published Wednesday by Gartner Dataquest.

SGI today announced that its SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters deliver world-record performance on the next-generation Intel Itanium 2 processor (Intel code name Madison). Preliminary results of 64-bit application tests reveal that "the SGI Altix 3000 family running on Madison will once again provide record-shattering performance, price/performance and scalability in a standard Linux OS environment".

So, which file manager is the best across many OSes? Click more and cast your vote!

Ben Hermans, project manager for AmigaOS4 has been interviewed by the Amiga.org staff.
Update: Ben has agreed with nOMAAM of Amiga.org on interviewing him once every 3/4 weeks, until the release of AmigaOS4.

"At the risk of sounding blasé, Mandrake 9.1 is a pretty standard distribution, and consists of the latest KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice.org, Xine, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PostgreSQL. The PowerPack version comes with 60-days of support via e-mail. The higher-priced ProSuite version of Mandrake comes with 60 days of telephone support and some additional server software." Read the review at LinuxWorld.

After a dissapointment with Red Hat's Anaconda installer, a user is on a quest to find the OS that will fit the bill. Reading an OSNews article he finds Vector Linux, he tries it, and here is his review of it.

Bart Lagerweij has created an easy way for users to create his/her own version of Microsoft's Windows Preinstallation Environment with his new PE Builder. Windows will then run off the CD-rom, without a needed hard drive installation.

With today's "Michael's Minute" comes the first official announcement of LindowsOS version 4.0. This humorous take does not include details about the OS improvements, but does seem consistent with their strategy of targetting Windows users looking to make the switch by promoting programs like gaim, Evolution, and Mozilla, which are very similar to their Windows-based competition.

Xr, the 2D Postscript-like graphics library for X is near completion. Xr is a device independent API, and can theoretically be layered upon an API like OpenGL.

"These are the results of a series of tests I did using IOZone to determine the performance of various filesystems under Mac OS X. I tested HFS+, HFS+ w/ journaling, HFS, UFS, and Ext2 . Due to wide variation in the results, I did at least 4 runs of each configuration and then used the best score for each test." Read the benchmarks here.

I entered the world of Apple hardware about 3 months ago now, with a second-hand iBook2. It was a 500mHz, 256mb, ATI Rage 128 model, with a standard CD-Rom drive. I spent the first few days trying to tweak Mac OS X to my liking, then a few further weeks installing and learning to use the applications I thought I'd need. Chimera, BBEdit, the developer tools, even the Fink X server so I could use Gaim.