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.

MandrakeSoft, the third biggest Linux provider which has known financial problems, decided to go ahead and offer advertising options via its upcoming operating system. Regular screensavers, bookmarks, default first browser page and Installation screens will feature advertisements. The ads will only be part of the free download edition and not the purchased version of the OS. OSNews featured a poll last year regarding advertising via an OS: 55% did not favor the idea, 30% did and 13% were not sure.

Linux, not Microsoft Windows, remains the most-attacked operating system, a British security company reports. During August, 67 per cent of all successful and verifiable digital attacks against on-line servers targeted Linux, followed by Microsoft Windows at 23.2 per cent. A total of 12,892 Linux on-line servers running e-business and information sites were successfully breached in that month, followed by 4,626 Windows servers, according to the report.

A new production version of the MySQL database, version 4.0.15, has been released. Additionally, MySQL Studio 4.2.5 is out: a set of MySQL GUI tools for database management, import/export, backup and monitoring tools for OSX and Windows. Firebird-SQL 1.5 RC-6 is out too, release notes. In the meantime, SAP unveils GUI Machine, a set of dev RAD tools, while an Oracle executive says the company is building a consortium of industry players to help create standards for commercial use of grid computing. Interesting results of the recent TPC-H benchmark performance testing on Clustered and non-Clustered 100GB and 300GB configurations.

A article over at NewMobileComputing asks whether 2003 is the "year of the laptop." It seems that the tide has turned, and laptops are powerful and cheap enough to be most people's main computers, and wireless networking is certainly a killer app. Also at NMC, a look at GSM vs. CDMA, wearable computing influencing fashion, and a 3D laptop.

The popular X11 DE, XFce, 4.0-RC4 was released. Release notes, download here.

A recent Gartner study (which unlike the Forrester one from this week was not commissioned by Microsoft) finds that while some businesses can save money by migrating desktop systems to Linux, others would do better to stick with Windows. Companies that have held off upgrading for quite some time and use a limited number of applications on the desktop may save money with Linux, but those that have already spent the time and effort to upgrade to recent Windows versions and those that depend on a wide range of apps should stay with Windows.