Three interesting Mac-related articles on the net today: "Macs vs PCs", "From Linux to OS X" and "A Disappointing Look At Apple’s Dual G5 Tower. Not The Machine I thought It Was" (article updated).

"For high-end and server applications, probably the most significant is in scalability," says Andrew Morton, who -- along with Linus Torvalds -- maintains the Linux kernel. "2.6 scales to more CPUs, more memory, more disks and larger disks," he told NewsFactor. Here is also a discussion about Linux kernel 2.7.

In advance of the official release announcement, the MandrakeSoft web site maintainers have uploaded the images for the 9.2 Feature Presentation. Tux Reports now has copies of most of these images, and can view them in the Screenshots Gallery. Click here to view the images.

"Sun Microsystems' Solaris will become the third operating system to take advantage of Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processor. Solaris, Sun's version of Unix, already runs on 32-bit "x86" processors including AMD's Athlon and Intel's Xeon. But Sun also will release a version in 2004 that will take advantage of the 64-bit extensions that make Opteron different from those other chips, Sun software chief Jonathan Schwartz told reporters in a meeting here Thursday." Read more at ZDNet.

This page is dedicated to providing information on running Linux on the Pegasos. ISO images included. We would love to see a better Yellow Dog Linux support and also Darwin on Pegasos.

Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major free BSD variants. Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz.

The new VMWare 4.0.5 release introduces internationalization of the shared folders and drag and drop features. These features now support localized guest operating systems, including locales such as Japanese that use double-byte characters. In this release, VMware Tools for Windows guests uses less memory than in previous releases.

On the heels of its landmark Sun Java Enterprise System announcements, Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced more than 300,000 registered licenses of the Solaris 9 Operating System (x86 Platform Edition). This volume attests to a surge in customer demand for the secure, reliable and highly performant Solaris OS on a variety of x86 systems, setting the foundation for continued growth and interest in Sun's Java Enterprise System. Read more for the rest of the press release.

The software giant will focus on adding new security technologies to its products, educating its customers and improving its process of releasing patches, CEO Steve Ballmer says.

Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company's Internet Explorer browser, but they can't seem to spark a flame. Elsewhere, Eolas Technologies, which has the rights to a browser plug-in patent, has filed a motion to permanently stop Microsoft distributing Internet Explorer browsers that infringe the patent.

KernelTrap reports that 2.6.0-test7 is out. Only bugfix patches will be accepted from now on.

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems.

IBM posted information (alternative link here) on their Global Solutions Directory about the upcoming Pegasos 2. Read the "Functional Description" for the hardware specs.

The purpose of this review is to provide some additional exposure to source-based Linux distributions in general, and Sorcerer in particular. We've been using Sorcerer where I work since January of this year and have been completely satisfied with the experience. Hopefully this review will give you a good idea of why we use Sorcerer, and it may move you to try it yourself. I'm no systems adminstrator, so if I can install and work with Sorcerer, most people with a little Linux experience will be able to also.