In an interview with eWEEK, Sun CEO Scott McNealy sounds off on the SCO-Linux dispute, Unix and his company's future. Also, here is a review of the Sun Fire x86 Server: The high-performance v65x edges similar x86 machines in price, eWeek says.

Lindows.com announced a dedicated web kiosk on Tuesday morning, intended to prevent users from accidentally making catastrophic changes to the machines. However, the new $169 WebStation also foregoes a hard drive, requiring a user to work with documents stored on the Web or on a floppy disk. Certain versions of Lindows.com's new kiosk also seal the CD-ROM drive inside the case, preventing additional retail software from being added later.

Havoc Pennington outlined recently the steps required to bring the freedesktop.org effort --to unite the specs/protocols of the X11-based DEs for better interoperability-- closer to its goal. Read more of the discussion in their list. On other X11 news, XFCE 4.0-RC2 was released for testing. UPDATE: Here is a screenshot of XFCE 4-RC2 running on Red Hat Linux "Severn" beta.

U.S. Copyright Office officially begins assignment of UNIX copyrights to SCO and the company is to provide UNIX License to commercial Linux end users. Press release, C|Net article. Here is also an inteview with McBride, SCO CEO at C|Net.

Although the C language has been around for close to 30 years, its appeal has not yet worn off. It continues to attract a large number of people who must develop new skills for writing new applications, or for porting or maintaining existing applications. This article has been written with the needs of the developer in mind, and offers suggestions that may help them in their job.

ZDNet's David Coursey, now a switcher, writes an editorial about the need Apple has to create a cheap Intel box with OSX in it, as a way to tone up its PPC sales and grandually switch x86 users, more than switch PPC users to Intel. OSNews featured a similar editorial recently, but suggesting a G3 CPU.

The company, whose software lets an Intel server run several operating systems simultaneously, releases new software that supports a much wider variety of computers.

LinuxInstall.org 1.4 was released today, a distribution built for Linux newbies and those who like a clean pre-configured install by default. Screenshots can be found here, read on for the release notes.

DistroWatch published the release notes of Red Hat Linux "Severn" 9.0.93. The beta is scheduled to be released early this week, so make sure you keep checking the FTP mirrors of Red Hat. "Don't expect too much new, however, as the beta release appears to be more of a consolidation release of Red Hat Linux 9, rather than a release full of cutting edge features" DistroWatch notes. We also spotted Severn's ability to get into graphics mode just right after the kernel is loaded. Update: The RHL site is up.

The first, very-alpha, release of the Qt library on DirectFB is now available for testing. A lot of things still have to be implemented, so please don't expect to be able to run Konqueror on DirectFB (yet). More info and screenshots at the Dot.

Todd Verling says that binaries for JDK 1.2.2 and 1.3.1 for NetBSD are now available. You'll find binary packages from pkgsrc-wip, as well as Sun-style JDK images, including standalone JRE and debug JDK symbols. Another relevant story about it, here.

Fleecy Moss has answered 10 new Amiga community questions addressing various topics at the AmigaWorld.net portal. Amiga Inc also opened a new community exchange homepage. Here people can contribute various software and art of which some will be selected by the community to be included on the AmigaOS4 CD.

In a teleconference to go over the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's fourth quarter and fiscal 2003 results on Thursday, CFO John Connors detailed the five biggest risks to his company's business. "The general economic environment is risk and driver No. 1," he said. "Linux and non-commercial software is risk No. 2." Elsewhere, Gartner says that 80% of the Linux desktops to be deployed in Munich, will be also running VMWare and Windows because of some applications.

Red Hat, the leading American distributor of Linux, is abandoning the retail channel, the company is expected to announce Monday. The company's next major release, codenamed "Cambridge," will not be provided in boxed, retail form, according to company communications with employees and developers, which have been made available to Linux and Main.