What's new in the upcoming Java version 1.4.2? The answer can be found in the discussion here.

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.

Several months ago William Lamb witnessed a heated debate in the open source community, an article titled "The Future Belongs to GNOME; Inertia to KDE," in which it was suggested that GNOME was overtaking the KDE project by being more responsive to the user community's needs.

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.

The CEO of DiscreetFX will pay 3000+ USD to the first developer(s) to port the current version of Mozilla to AmigaOS. Read the announcement for the details and people can provide Bill suggestions here at the AmigaWorld.net portal. Update: The money pot is now at $3000+ and rising.

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.

Yet another head to head review, this time from the perspective of a developer that's spent 10+ years with Windows, "who views the Mac zealotry with a wary eye", as he says. The same author also wrote "On Switching to the Mac" editorial in the past.

"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.

eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, working in conjunction with the eCos maintainers, today announced the release of eCos 2.0, the latest version of the eCos real-time operating system.

DirectX 9.0a is an updated version of the DirectX 9.0 runtime which includes bug fixes and improves performance in the graphics and networking components. There are no new or modified APIs in this release. What's new or fixed:

"Microsoft's connection to the anti-Linux campaign being waged by the SCO Group is becoming clear", Bruce Perens writes in his editorial at C|Net.

Sun has ample reason to tout low-cost computing. Its Solaris is the leading Unix OS, running primarily on the company's proprietary servers. But Sun faces the erosion of its server business as lower cost Intel-based servers become the industry standard. Sun will replace its own Sparc processors with Intel and AMD chips to create a 'budget' range of blade servers, running on Solaris x86. Also, Sun is to distribute Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat is to distribute Sun's Java.

Genesi was very kind to send us in a fully featured Pegasos-based computer with MorphOS and Debian pre-installed. Here is our review with a number of screenshots of the supported OSes. Update: That machine has now being donated to the Computer History Museum in the Bay Area.

Hewlett-Packard on Monday plans to ship the latest version of its Unix-based HP-UX operating system for Intel's family of Itanium processors. The company also plans to announce commitments from 40 developers to deliver applications for the platform.