"Mandrake Linux 9.1 RC1 was released without fanfare on Tuesday 18 February afternoon in Paris, and as the ISO images percolated through the various mirrors worldwide, I prepared my hardware for another review of the latest pre-release of MandrakeSoft's "swiss-knife" Linux distribution. My previous articles have dealt exclusively with Mandrake's use on the desktop. This time around, I tested Mandrake 9.1 RC1 on three different platforms: a home use mid-range desktop workstation, my trusty old-and-battered Dell laptop, and last but not least a dual Celeron homebuilt SMP box nowadays used as a file server and test rig." Read it at DistroWatch.

"I have a Pentium 3 866MHZ CPU. After reading the freshmeat article on optimizing GCC a few days ago, it got me thinking. So I posed the following question: How much faster would gcc compile the kernel if gcc itself was optimized?" Read the rest at Linux Gazette.

"Going by the numbers, Apple Computer Inc. appears headed for trouble again. While CEO Steven P. Jobs engineered a remarkable comeback after retaking the helm in 1997, one-time expenses, such as plant closures, have pushed the company into the red for two quarters running." Read more at BusinessWeek.

NeoWin reports that they got their hands on a new leaked version of Windows Longhorn, the next big version of Windows. Commentary: The reporter insists that these are original shots. Lots of grandients are going on in the UI and while this is an alpha and the final version might look different (that's what happened with XP's Luna, MS only revealed XP's final design only a few months before the release, while most betas used another theme), these shots showing there are just pretty ugly IMHO. Bad taste on colors, no easy distinction between elements, it all looks like a big bad web page.

This is the saga of Hugh Loebner and his search for an intelligent bot has almost everything: Sex, lawsuits and feuding computer scientists. There's only one thing missing: Smart machines. Read the first part and the second part at Salon.com.

"Microsoft on Friday signed a pact with the Chinese government to reveal the Windows source code, making China among the first to benefit from its program to allay the security fears of governments. In addition, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates hinted that China will be privy to all, not just part, of the source code the government wishes to inspect. " Read the rest at ZDNet.

The Mono Project just released Mono 0.21, only a few days after 0.20 due mainly to a bug in the compiler which made it abort on top-level enums and delegates on Windows. In the meantime, various other minor bugs were fixed on the class libraries, the runtime and the compiler. Additionally, the similar Portable.Net dotGNU project, released version 0.5.2 recently.

In this guest column at DesktopLinux.com, former SCO evangelist and Samba.org team leader John H. Terpstra weighs in on market perceptions about Linux and its suitability for the desktop. Interviewing a sample group –- that included 30 people evenly split in the Linux and MS camps -- Terpstra discovered each group cited the very same arguments in defending their OS of choice! The author sought definitive answers about the state of Desktop Linux and reasons for and against a switch to Linux. The results, and key factors, were not as expected.

"Lycoris does what I mentioned a few days ago on this site. It lets a person sit down and gets some work done without ever needing to crack the hood. Mandrake, Red Hat, and many other Linux versions are equivalent to buying a kit full of parts and tools and building your own car. Lycoris is like going to the dealership, plunking down the cash, and driving away. Lindows offers the same thing. But Lindows costs $129, rather than $29. And Lindows requires a yearly subscription plan of $99 a year. Whereas the Lycoris plan is included in the one time purchase price. And Lindows is proprietary, you cannot download it for free. Xandros also claims to be aimed at the windows user. But Xandros costs $99 and is proprietary. You can't get it for free either. So much for choice. Lycoris is now running on both my systems." Read the blog entry at TheForge, by Barry Smith.

The new IBM PowerPC 970 is the heart of the PowerPC Blade. It is based on the 64-Bit Power 4 architecture which is also used in the processors of the IBM eServer pSeries. The 64-bit microprosessor offers full symmetrical multi-processing, has a high reliability (with parity L1, ECC L2 and parity checked system bus) and is manufactured in the latest 0,13 micrometer Copper/SOI CMOS technology. The CPU runs at frequences ranging from 1.8 GHz - 2.5 Ghz, therefore the IBMPowerPC 970 is the fastest PowerPC so far. It also features onchip 512 KB L2 Cache, Altivec Vector/SIMD unit, 6,4 GB/s I/O system bus throughput. Rumors want that chip to be the next CPU used by Apple when it's out.

"The new operating system is expected to be a key weapon in Microsoft's battle against low-cost software based on freely shared code. Although various versions of Windows run more than 90 percent of the world's computers, software developers are increasingly drawn to open-source software such as the Linux operating system". Read the article at SeattleTimes by Brier Dudley.

Time to heat up those CPUs, Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc3 has been released. You can find LiveCDs, and stage tarballs at the Gentoo master mirror. At this time, the release includes basic x86 builds, PowerPC support for generic PowerPC, G3 and G4 systems, and Sparc and UltraSparc support.

Andrew Morton recently posted some interesting benchmarks comparing the current 2.4 IO scheduler, a "hacked" version of the deadline IO scheduler in 2.5.61, the CFQ scheduler, and the anticipatory scheduler. Offering a succinct "executive summary" of his results, Andrew said, "the anticipatory scheduler is wiping the others off the map, and 2.4 is a disaster." Indeed, in many of the tests the other IO schedulers were measured in minutes, whereas the anticipatory IO scheduler was measured in mere seconds. Read the report at KernelTrap by Jeremy Andrews.

Murphy's October 2001 TCO analysis generated much reader comment. In this article, the first installment in a two-part series, he revisits the Linux-versus-Windows decision for the faculty of a small college or university.