O'Reilly posted four interesting Mac dev articles on MacDevCenter: "Ten Things I Dig About Xcode", "Creating Easy-to-Deploy Unix Applications for OS X", "Start Me Up: Writing and Understanding OS X StartupItems" and "Programming REALbasic, Part 1: Syntax of the Language".

WinNetMag reports that in November Microsoft is planning to release for a small fee (usually it's $20) a first public beta of Longhorn. MSDN members will get it for free in December. The report states that the first pre-beta won't feature the new Aero UI.

SciTech has announced an agreement with ATI, which will enable advanced multi-OS (Linux X11, Qt/Embedded, OS/2, Athene, Amiga, SMX, and more) support for ATI's mobile, desktop and embedded visual processors in future versions of SciTech SNAP Graphics IES and ENT versions.

Panther will be released tonight and people already started the queues outside the Apple Stores in US. OSNews will be present tonight at Palo Alto's store reporting, as we did last year. Many sites online present Panther today: "A Developer's Look at Panther", "Xcode: The future of Mac development tools", "Take a Peek at Panther: See what Apple's latest OS can do for you", "New OS to go on sale tonight; fourth upgrade in 2.5 years", "Panther Server: 'Open source made easy'", "Panther: A look at the new Mac OS", while XvsXP has being updated shooting out WinXP and OSX. Update: Two more: "Apple Panther Aims at Enterprise Compatibility" and "Apple's Panther OS: Is This the One?"

Just a couple of weeks into a new release, Mandrake Linux 9.2 users have encountered all sorts of problems. First, it was the problem of the missing kernel-source from the original ISO's as reported on the Mandrake Club site, then it was a slew of a major bugfix set of patches, including fixes to KDE and the kernel, and now reports are surfacing on Cooker (and which has been confirmed on Mandrake's site that Mandrake Linux 9.2 is killing some cdroms made by LG Electronics.

"If we were to re-write Linux, taking clues from various operating systems, what would we make sure it did? Our next-generation operating system (NGOS) would be completely modular in design, aimed at 64-bit hardware, and with an interface that would change the way people compute. It would support a large number of applications and hardware devices, accepting device drivers written for other operating system, and run applications written for other operating system under an emulation mode." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

MSFN has posted a few shots of the upcoming Virtual PC 2004 runtime/emulator PC engine.

If you haven't read part 1 of this -- "Babe in the Woods: A Linux User Migrates to FreeBSD" -- you may be at a loss. For those who did read it, many are still at a loss. That is, they didn't grasp the subtle purpose behind the article. Of those who commented, most were hardcore geeks, the techies who are in a position to really understand computers. Find out how Ed is doing in FreeBSD these days at OfB.biz.

Steve Ballmer has a hard job. Being the CEO of a company the size of Microsoft is brutal and exhausting. Against his nature, Ballmer has been trying to change his own persona and the company culture. So far, he appears to have made progress. In my mind, Microsoft is a more mature corporate entity that it used to be. The startup mentality is important to hold on to, but isn't functional as the core value of a $30 billion company. What Ballmer needs to do is hold on to the best of the existing culture, while transforming it into something new. Tough job. I couldn't do it.

In a keynote speech Wednesday at the Enterprise Linux Forum, Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann bluntly stated that today the company's "focus is on the enterprise."

Users are asking for better support for things such as third-party drivers, printer management and graphic interfaces, says NWFusion. Read their top10 requested features. Elsewhere, "Mthe adoption of Linux on the desktop is progressing, but there won't be a "David and Goliath" single blow that suddenly slays the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, Linux advocates said at an enterprise Linux conference Wednesday.". Read that article at IDG.

Japan's Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems Inc have agreed to combine their server businesses, with high-end models to be made by a Fujitsu unit, a newspaper reported on Thursday. On other Sun news, they are ready to link Solaris x86 boxes into the SAN.

"Servers need what free desktop applications needed before KDE came: a common framework. A common way of configuration, a common way of being configured using GUI tools, a unified view to monitor them… there are also options that many server have in common, like a IP to listen to or the allowed IP ranges." Read the editorial here.

"SUSE unwraps a must-have desktop distribution for power-hungry power users wanting more than the latest and greatest in 32 bits." Read the review at Open Mag.