A number of Mac news sites are citing insider information and claim that Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (version 7B85 or 6) has reached Golden Master status and is heading for duplication.

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.

A high-profile digital civil liberties group is criticizing a component of the "trusted computing" technology promoted by Microsoft, IBM and other tech companies, calling the feature a threat to computer users.

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.

At this week's RVC Softedge 2003 conference, a group of open source developers argued over innovation, commoditization and how the work really gets done. Among the topics: How far can "open" go in a professional development setting?

Conceding that its strategy of patching Windows holes as they emerge has not worked, Microsoft plans next week to outline a new security effort focused on what the company calls "securing the perimeter," a company executive told CNET News.com.

MirBSD is a derivative of OpenBSD. It is i386-only, and has some packages removed (Kerberos etc.). Additional features include IPv6 support in Apache, ports for djb-ware, a new bootloader and more.

Do you have a favorite OS or distribution with an upcoming release? We'd like you to do a review and publish it on OSNews. We can usually contact the company and get you an official copy of the release to use for your review (usually ahead of its official release, and mostly true for Linux distros). Aren't comfortable with your writing skills? As long as you're comfortable doing the review, an OSNews editor can assist you in making your observations readable. If you're interested, read more.

GNUstep is a set of general-purpose Objective-C libraries based on the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Inc. This release features many improvements and enhancements of various classes, including NSPopUpButton, NSBitmapImageRep, NSMenu, and NSToolbar. Support for thumbnail images was implemented in NSWorkspace. On other toolkit news, wxWindows 2.4.2 was released recently.

Silicon Graphics Inc says that it has received notice from SCO Group Inc that the Unix vendor intends to terminate its Unix System V license on the basis that SGI has breached the terms of the license. UPDATE: SGI's letter to the Open Source Community.

A few days ago an Amiga event took place in Empoli, Italy. Here are reports of it (1, 2) and also pictures of the event (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In the event there was also a MorphOS show and a YellowTAB Zeta one.

Version 3.0 of SnapGear Embedded Linux, based on Linux kernel 2.6, is now available for free download. The latest SnapGear security-oriented embedded Linux distribution is claimed to be the "world's first production Linux system powered by the 2.6 kernel" -- but is also a watershed release in that for the first time, commercial developers can use a stable Linux kernel distribution, without patching, to build deeply embedded systems on devices without a memory management unit (MMU).

OpenQNX has become the main news portal these days for the QNX fans. It includes some interesting news articles and also two tutorials: "QNX NC Install Without Burning a Disc" & "QNX & VMWare 4.0".

Here is our review of the new 1.25 GHz 15" Powerbook G4.