US software giant Microsoft will tie up with a Japanese non-profit group to develop next generation operating systems for everything from refrigerators to mobile phones. The tie-up would enable appliances, cars and other gadgets worldwide that operate on the group's free TRON operating system to eventually work like personal computers.

After Microsoft threatened to sue Lindows.com over the introduction of MSFreePC.com, a service provided to help Californians who are set to receive a settlement from Microsoft in their antitrust case, Lindows.com CEO Michael Robertson took the offensive with this letter to Microsoft. Anything but subtle, I'd say.

A company is maketing a product called Lover Spy, which allows the customer to send a "greeting" to an acquaintance. That greeting contains a hidden application that installs itself on the victim's computer and reports back information on that person's online activities. It's intended to be a way for jealous lovers to keep tabs on their partner. It's a remote version of the old "install a keystroke logger on your boyfriend" trick. It's also probably illegal in the United States.

In the dawn of the renovation of freedesktop.org's web site, David Zeuthen announced the release of HAL 0.1. HAL is an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer, as defined by Havoc Pennington's paper. It encompasses a shared library for use in applications, a daemon, a hotplug tool, command line tools and a set of stock device info files. Carlos Perelló Marín also announced the design of a similar concept, but it is expected the two projects to merge. More people are encouraged to join this innovative project. Elsewhere, Gnome's Seth Nickell is giving us a first taste of his effort to replace the Init system.

PPCnux published a followup interview with Pieter Van den Abeele, David Holm, Lars Weiler and Sascha Schwabbauer from the Gentoo/PPC team. They are currently working on out of the box cross compilation for OSX, Cygwin and Linux.

Linux distributor SuSE said last week that future versions of the open source operating system may arrive at a slower rate, a move designed to increase stability for users. UPDATE: SuSE Linux 9.0 offers sneak peek at 2.6 Linux kernel, 32/64-bit support, and easier Windows migration, the official press release says. Chris Schläger, Director of Distribution Development at SuSE, explains some details of the most important new features.

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.

With an upgrade to the Windows XP variant due Tuesday, the software maker aims to address critiques from its earliest customers. Dell, Sony and other PC makers are standing by. In the meantime, the Chinese government has set up a lab to study Microsoft Windows source code.

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

The renamed OS-Opinions.com to OSViews.com sports three editorials today: "Advanced Technology: Less = More", "Intel will Eat Crow and Support AMD's x86-64"", and "Blame Who For OS Insecurity?".

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

SuSE Linux announced today that it will release SuSE Linux 9.0 on October 24. The latest version of the company's home user operating system will be the first to support AMD's Athlon 64 CPU, and will include a test version of the 2.6 Linux kernel, according to Holger Dyroff, SuSE's GM, Americas.

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.

This article describes how to install and deploy the Sun Fire Link product so that it can be securely managed and operated. This is the second article in a two-part series, this article provides recommendations for securing the Sun Linux 5.0 operating system. This article provides a technical overview of the Linux operating environment and compares and contrasts it with the Solaris OE.