The first meeting of the New York City Pegasos Users Group is scheduled to occured in September. Read on for more information.

Red Hat is making no secret of the fact that it's trying to focus on revenue-generating enterprise customers, even if that means losing throngs of small users who provide little to no revenue. Many of the largest hosting companies use Red Hat Linux, but as the company changes its focus, that may change, especially if Red Hat is slow to release important patches for non-paying customers, says a Netcraft report.

Popular Intel-PC emulation software VirtualPC will not run on the G5 Powermacs. Microsoft, the new VirtualPC owner, says that compatability will have to wait until the next full version of the software, a year away. In other news, FWB, the makers of once VirtualPC-rival RealPC, will not be porting their product to Mac OS X. The current management decries the former management's hyping "vaporware" by promising a new version of RealPC.

This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.

The latest beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has some useful updates and is significantly more polished than the last beta, according to this review. The review has lots of screenshots.

For an alternative OS to be a viable desktop contender, it must have a good web browser. Mac OS X's biggest stumbling block at its introduction was its limited selection of (slow) web browsers. Things have changed. Now there are more than 9 to choose from. Ars Technica has a head-to-head comparison. Gecko-based browsers stand out in speed and functionality, but look like ports, while Safari earns the top spot for just being well put together. In a similar vein Mac P2P outlines the various P2P options for Mac users.

As we all anxiously await the release of Linux 2.6, we hear speculations on the final date ranging from early September to late December. A fellow optimist from comhem.se has posted this graph showing predictions based on the kernel's current rate of progress. It was composed using the compile statistics from John Sherry of OSDL. This chart suggests a release date of the 12th of October.

SCO's own Chris Sontag responds to the recent remarks about SCO's presentation of "stolen code." My Take: Is there an IT professional left in America who would ever consider buying SCO software again? Update: It never ends. Novell has joined the fray.

The GEOS operating system for the Apple II computer, once very much ahead of its time, has been officially re-released by its current owner, Breadbox Computer, LLC. You can now download it for free. I know it could already be downloaded from several dark corners of the Internet but I thought it might still be worth a note.

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux is a simple to use, easy to configure alternative to XFree86 Graphics Drivers. This latest release supports 125 graphics cards on multiple Linux distributions with full 2D acceleration and adds support for the latest hardware from ATI.

According to MacNN, sources are reporting that the latest developer release of Mac OS X "Panther" has changed its default shell from tcsh to bash. From ISPs using both OSX and Linux, it's kind of good news. It seem that Linux's popularity gives some kind of "prefered shell" status to bash.

PHP developers have just released PHP 4.3.3. This release fixes a large number of bugs and all users of PHP are urged to upgrade. Full list of fixes can be found in the news file . Read the release announcement here

Interview by David Ford with Jonathan Walther, on fantasy, literature, life and primarily Xouvert the branch of Xfree86, which he is leading.

Rumors have been flying about new 15" Powerbooks, and now we learn that Steve Jobs will be giving a keynote speech at Apple Expo 2003 in Paris on September 16. Though I'm sure it's being saved for one of Steve's "and one more thing" zingers at the end of the speech, it's pretty likely that new 15" Powerbooks (still with a G4, but with illuminated keyboard) will be released.