Recently, an article published in OSNews by Joshua Boyles entitled "The Edge Computing System" captured my attention. This led me to publish my own article entitled "The Next Big Thing? Open Peripheral Hardware Connectivity." I appreciate all the feedback, but I feel that there is still a certain amount of confusion concerning what I was proposing. So, here is a Part II. follow-on article...with some insights that hopefully may flesh things out a bit more.

About a month ago, NeTraverse contacted OfB Labs with an early release copy of Win4Lin 5.0, the follow-up to the already impressive Win4Lin 4.0 released in May 2002. Win4Lin, for those not familiar with it, offers near-native (or better) speed "virtualization" of a Windows box so that one can run Windows 9x (95/98/Me) inside GNU/Linux. Read the review at OfB.

If your embedded system doesn't need networking and storage, porting Linux to your hardware may not be worth the effort, Embedded.com says.

Today we host an interview with Andy Tucker, Distinguished Engineer of the Solaris kernel. We talk about the internals of Solaris, the competition and the future of the Solaris OE. The 9th question was answered by Robert O'Dea, Director of Engineering at Sun Microsystems.

Hewlett-Packard apparently slipped up and revealed some of the specifications for AMD's upcoming Athlon64 chip, a processor that HP seems to be preparing to use in its PCs. Although the specifications fit within the expected performance range for the chip, the 1.8GHz speed and 3100+ model number may begin to raise questions about AMD's ability to keep up with Intel, C|Net says.

In a new court document, the SCO Group criticizes Linus Torvalds, the guardian and copyright holder of the freely shared Linux operating system. Update: Two more articles, one at TheInquirer, one at Forbes.

Licensing doesn't really lock customers into a constant frenzied upgrade cycle of products they don't actually need. Read the article at Silicon.com.

This article is a review of Linuxinstall.org 3.0, a Redhat 8.0 based distro aimed at the new home user . Some time back, after reinstalling windows for the umpteenth time I knew there had to be a better alternative. But the more I researched the more confused I got. Debian-Slackware-Knoppix-Redhat? etc,etc. Linux was totally new to me - I wanted stability and speed without the viruses, but I was starting to get overwhelmed from choice and command line phobia. I just wanted an o.s. similiar to Windows in ease of use, but stable!

Mozilla 1.4-RC2 is released, release notes here.

The dot is reporting on KDE's 3.2 release schedule and feature plan.

The latest "SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux Beta" now provides plug-and-play support for more than 100 of the most popular chipsets, full 2D acceleration, and is certified by SciTech to be compatible with nearly a dozen different Linux distributions.

Here is a tutorial on writing your own OS. A help to start you out.

From the dot: "Trolltech announced today that they will release a GPL version of Qt/Mac on June 23rd at the Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco taking their successful dual licensing strategy for Qt/X11 to the Mac. Also the upcoming Qt Script for Applications (QSA), Trolltech's scripting toolkit for Qt-based applications, will be available under a dual license on Mac OS X. Sam Magnuson from Trolltech already got much of KDE building on Qt/Mac a while ago (screenshots showing Konqueror, Kontact, Games and KOffice). The new license now offered allows to distribute binary builds of KDE for Qt/Mac soon." KDE aside, this will help many other developers to deliver multi-platform apps.

I know this has been covered at length, but none of the reviews that I've read thus far were terribly helpful to me. I've written my own page, based on my own experiences, with specific recommendations for longtime Windows users who are contemplating the switch to Linux.