Many readers wrote in to warn about the MSBlast worm making its way around the internet. W32.Blaster.Worm utilizes TFTP to spread itself and intends to slam the WindowsUpdate website beginning August 16. Microsoft warned of this vulnerability back in July. This informative article explains more. Update your systems now before it's too late!

Tux Reports continues their look at RPM based distributions with Ark Linux 1.0 alpha8. This community project stands with a growing number of distributions attempting to build an environment for the desktop. The project's goals are to create a distribution which is easy for new Linux users to install, maintain, and update. Read More at TuxReports.

India is shaping up to be a big battleground in a Microsoft vs Linux fight. An estimated 10% of PCs in India shipped with Linux this year, and it Indian software development industry is important for many global companies. With a talented and educated, but still economically disadvantaged, workforce, India is fertile ground for Linux to gain prominence. Microsoft knows what's at stake, and even recently dispatched Bill Gates to India, though some think that the visit only drew attention to Linux.

"Alan Nugent, CTO of Novell, thinks he knows how to drive wide adoption of the Linux desktop. How? Make it so users can't tell (and don't care) it's not Windows, and make it so admins can manage thousands of Linux desktops as easily as Windows. " Newforge has the article .

A recent ZDNet article is written by the erstwhile author of a "troubleshooting Windows" book who is sometimes so stymied by mysterious Windows stability problems that he isn't sure he can write a useful book. The article covers a recent "hangs for no reason" issue that required trial and error and a plethora of included and third party utilities to diagnose and fix.

MorphZone reports that MorphOS 1.4 is now available via FTP.

Aryan wrote a mini-review of Libranet 2.8. Read it here.

Here is some information about Windows XP 64bit. It has some features not found on any 32bit Windows version, but it is missing some other features not ported/tested yet.

"Depending on how much you care for writing new versions of old programs, Reiser4 could be either one of the greater boons to software engineers or one of the greater banes. Either way, programming on Linux will likely never be the same. It's not too remote a possibility that other popular platforms will be influenced as well." Read the article at Kuro5hin.

Sun announced yesterday that a native Java version for the AMD 64 bit processor will be available on Linux and Windows platforms, allowing companies to migrate their current Java applications from a 32-bit to 64-bit computing platform.

The OmniGroup released version 4.5 of their popular browser, OmniWeb, for Mac OS X. This release is the first that is based on WebCore instead of OmniGroup's HTML rendering engine. On other browsing news, Opera had more than 10 million downloads via opera.com, while Epiphany 0.8.2 is released recently.

Mark Mitchell recently announced the release of GCC 3.3.1, including "a very large number of bug-fixes relative to GCC 3.3". Mark goes on to add, "The next release of GCC will be GCC 3.3.2, which will be a bug-fix release."

The Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 includes ASP.NET Mobile Controls that enable developers to easily create mobile Web applications. Developers can write and maintain a single application that targets multiple devices. The Windows 2000 Authorization Manager Runtime is a Windows 2000 Server version of the Windows Server 2003 Authorization Manager role-based access control API. This download contains a setup that will correctly install the DirectX 9.0b documentation for use with the .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Here it is again the monthly AROS news update plus new screenshots.