Microsoft is expected next month to disclose more details on Longhorn, its planned upgrade to Windows, as the company looks to drive demand for the forthcoming operating system. At its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the Redmond, Wash., software maker will detail Longhorn's underlying graphics and user interface technology, code-named Aero/Avalon.

AfterStep is an X window manager which started by emulating the NeXTSTEP look and feel and changed along the way. The new version fixes compilation bugs, shaped windows bugs, I18N bugs, move-resize bugs, Pager bugs, and more have been fixed. Mouse cursor changing has been reimplemented in different parts of the window. look.glass has been updated. Desktop session saving and restoring has been implemented. In other X releases, Cairo is an X11 vector graphics library with cross-device output support. Version 1.5 was released today.

Microsoft is working to add 'rich user interaction' to its next-generation Windows client.

The forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 suite will include a new feature to thwart worms & hackers.

Linux has developed an undeserved reputation as less scalable than commercial Unix and Windows, say Sam Greenblatt, Kenneth Milberg, Matt O'Keefe and John H. Terpstra in an interview with SearchEnterpriseLinux. This reputation can be attributed to the vendors of competing platforms to a major extent. Organizations like Google and NOAA are using huge Linux clusters that prove otherwise, and in the past few years there has been huge improvement in scalability.

MadPenguin takes the scoop with a first look at SuSE Linux 9.0. The review is very favorable. Screenshots are included.

InformIT's new Windows Server Reference Guide debuts this week, and to lead you through the mysteries is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. This week he talks about a little concept called presence. This sample chapter touches on some of the new interface changes and features in Windows Server 2003. It isn't a backup program. It isn't an OS re-install. But the System Restore built into Windows XP can save you from a world of hurt.

Linux will become ubiquitous in the year 3000. Okay, that was a horrible joke. Linux is just a kernel, the engine that runs an operating system. By itself, it is essentially useless. Kernels shouldn't be discussed or noticed by normal users. And as such when providing these users with reviews, previews and "professional" opinions, computer consultants, computer reviewers and computer journalists should not spew headlines like "Linux is not ready for prime time", "Linux on the desktop by XXX", "Linux to takeover Windows", "Linux is not ready for desktop" and so on.

In the spark of the upcoming MS Office, OO.o, KOffice and the recent release of Gnome Office 1.0, Gobe has released a new demo version to their office suite, Gobe Productive, version 3.0.4. However purchasers of the full version haven't seen the actual free upgrade to 3.0.4 from 3.0.3, which fixes a number of bugs (this update has apparently stack in testing for more than a year).

Poul-Henning Kamp has uploaded his paper about the new GEOM-based disk encryption service in FreeBSD, which is a good read for everyone with an interest in information security and encryption.

Linus Torvalds released the 2.6-test6 development kernel with a number of exciting changes. Most notably this includes some impressive performance enhancements written by an Australian doctor, Con Kolivas. Additionally, it includes Al Viro's "32-bit dev_t" patch, bumping up the number of device types that can be allocated by the Linux kernel.

It seems that the release of Panther is not far away. The latest seeded build does not have the Pre-Release status in the About box. Additionally, Apple looks poised to refresh its famous logo.

Reading through this report here, the author gives some well thought out reasons for a next generation Windows Server architecture for X.

The second Slackware release in the 9.x series (based on the GCC 3.2.3 compiler), Slackware Linux 9.1 continues the ten-year Slackware tradition of simplicity, stability, and security. OSNews featured a preview of Slackware 9.1 two days ago with many screenshots. Buy for only $40 or download for free.