PC Magazine has posted a Windows XP guide designed to walk non-experts through some of the alternate settings and add-ons that make XP work better. It has compiled various tips from its past issues into one guide for easy reference. Even Windows power-users may find something of interest.

Desktop Evolution launches De-Tablet integrated Lycoris Desktop L/X Tablet Edition with the Toshiba Portege Tablet Platform as a Powerful Linux Tablet. De-Tablet provides a flexible Linux desktop operating system in Lycoris Desktop L/X Tablet Edition on a powerful Toshiba hardware platform. De-Tablet is immediately available for purchase from ThinRetail.com or directly from Desktop Evolution.

The operating system company makes a further move into the hardware business, offering Linux on a desktop computer with flat-panel monitor for $449. The computer has a 1.2GHz Duron processor, 256MB of SDRAM and a 20GB hard drive.

"A company that specializes in running Linux on Macs said Wednesday that it has landed a deal to supply the U.S. Navy with 260 Apple Xserve servers. Terra Soft Solutions said the machines will be used as part of a sonar imaging system that defense contractor Lockheed Martin is building for the Navy. Rather than using the Mac OS, the Apple servers will run Terra Soft's Yellow Dog Linux operating system." Read more at CNET News.com

Contiki OS, "a highly portable, modern, open source, Internet-enabled operating system and desktop environment for very constrained systems," has been ported to the x86 platform. Previously able to run on only much smaller platforms, such as Atari, Gameboy, and Commodore, this is good news for developers interested in researching the OS.

Windows 95...in less than 5 MB? It's been done. Based on the work of Richard E. James and redruM69 (who recently boiled down Windows 95 to less than 10 MB, and 5.3MB, respectively), msbetas.net was able to juice it down to just 4.47 MB.

The European Union says Microsoft is still abusing its monopoly with Windows Media Player. The press release can be found here.

Novell, the recent purchasers of Ximian, have announced that they may cease development of their incredible NetWare NOS. Update 01:41 EST: Maybe not. Seems they are not ceasing as much as moving to more of a "maintenance mode."

KernelTrap has an interesting article about a recent benchmark conducted to compare five journaling filesystems available with the current 2.6.0-test2 Linux development kernel. The tests were conducted with a very simple shell script, mainly timing how long it takes to copy, tar, and remove directories. Looks like reiser4 is the fastest filesystem at the expense of consuming much more CPU, with ext3 trailing a ways behind.

MandrakeSoft has released the second beta version of Mandrake Linux 9.2. A list of changes and download locations can be found here.

"This week, however, Linux was also awarded with CC security certification, and as one might expect, this announcement greeted with cheers from the open source community. There's just one catch: Linux got a lower security rating than Windows 2000 did last year." Read it at WinInformant. Update: The WinInformant article is a little slanted in its reporting, since the ratings discussed have little to do with how secure either OS is in real-world use. Keep in mind that to achieve the higher rating, the computer is not allowed to be connected to any network, since network-connected computers are inherently vulnerable. A CNN article shoots a little straighter on the subject. The certification is not a contest to see which is more secure, simply a test to see if the OS matches a certain objective set of criteria. You have to severely cripple a modern OS to make it meet government high security certification.

Microsoft has laid plans for a server version of Longhorn, the next release of Windows. But it remains unclear what the software will include and when it will debut.

Xandros, Inc., today announced the opening of the beta program for the 2.0 release of its award-winning Xandros Desktop. Users interested in testing Xandros Desktop 2.0 are invited to apply at the Xandros web site. Xandros is also looking for IT administrators considering mass deployment of the Xandros Desktop to test the forthcoming release of Xandros Networks Enterprise. For more info check here.

"Lindows CEO wants a piece of Microsoft": Q&A with Lindows.com CEO Michael Robertson who wants to turn the Linux operating system into a real alternative to Windows--but he's fighting an uphill battle.