Network software pioneer Novell Inc. is dusting off its operating system and readying a version that highlights improved management and administration capabilities, as well as features targeted at the developer community. Read the article at eWeek.

Apple Computer, formerly the undisputed leader in sales of personal computers to schools, has steadily lost ground over the years to lower-priced PCs that run Microsoft Windows software. And these days the company faces another threat in the education market: a proposed class-action legal settlement by Microsoft that could result in the donation of hundreds of millions of dollars of Microsoft software to needy schools throughout California.

A handfull of well known --to the BeOS community-- developers have come together to create a new OS, which starts where BeOS left off. Bear in mind that this OS, named Sequel, is not a BeOS clone, but a brand new OS which adds new things in the mix while retains the best features found on BeOS and other OSes. The OS is closed source and it is in early stages: it currently boots off a floppy and has a shell. Editor's note: I am part of the small team, since its first days, a few months ago. I designed part of the UI for this OS, but I am looking forward to get a working GUI system before I dive in and do some "real" work on the UI and usability. Stay tuned for more news about Sequel in the future. UPDATE: Please note that this is NOT "my" project. I merely help out the guys on the UI, and nothing more. UPDATE 2: March 2003: I have resigned of my role on Sequel.

We've received an anonymous report from Trumpet Software that they have a 64 bit (x86-64) version of their operating system PetrOS running in their lab. This kernel (which is fully 64 bit) can run 32 bit and 64 bit userland programs which conform the PetrOS ABI. The development team used the latest version of Bochs 2.0 which has recently been enhanced to emulate x86-64 architecture. The anonymous source hinted that a beta version of 64 bit PetrOS would be released some time in March 2003.

The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state, fsck times go down, and it is easy to fall-back to the last good state of the filesystem in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD. Read more at BSDForums.
Our Take: Anyone's working on porting SGI's XFS to FreeBSD?

This article at InformIT (free reg. req.) will help the reader understand the architecture of modern microprocessors by introducing and explaining the most common terminology and addressing some of the performance related aspects. Written for programmers and people who have a general interest in microprocessors, this article presents introductory information on caches and is designed to provide understanding on how modern microprocessors work and how a cache design impacts performance.

"The largest flaw with Linux is not in its ease of use or installation. There's no crisis with lack of software. The hardware support is solid. Actually, I feel Linux is very much ready for the masses. The greatest flaw with Linux is that nobody knows what it is." Read the full commentary at NewsForge.

"According to testers for America Online, the company is moving forward with improving its client software for Mac OS X. The upgrade is called "AOL for Mac OS X Plus," and build 200 B is available under the beta section at AOL. This past summer, America Online publicly released AOL for OS X." Read more at ThinkSecret.

There is a new version of the X11 desktop environment which emulates Windows, XPde.

YellowTab has updated its web site, added some screenshots from Zeta's betas, while recent press releases from the group are mentioning YellowTab getting financial support and collaborating with another firm on securing Zeta.

Espen Sand announces the availability of first preview of Opera 7 for Linux. The Linux specific features from 6.1 no longer exist, the new preview release comes with an email and news client. You can pick from a static or shared (dynamically linked) packages. Read the email and get the download links from BSDForums. Additionally, Opera released yesterday a funny version of Opera 7 for Windows, as an answer to the MSN problems. In other browser news, Apple released a third Safari beta (v60) recently.

"Windows XP, which has been marketed by Microsoft as "the most secure version ever," has been found to have a flaw so bone-headed that it renders passwords ineffective as a means of keeping people out of your PC. Reader Tony DeMartino alerted me to the problem, which all administrators of Windows XP machines should immediately take to heart:" Read Brian's article at BrianBuzz.com.

Red Hat and Mandrake are cutting support for older versions of their Linux distributions... The results will be a security nightmare for the Internet, says Jon Lasser.

"Over the past year and change I've worked on porting quite a few projects to OS X. At first, it's a pretty scary ordeal, but most of the issues you'll run into are easily solved if you know how. To save yourself the trouble of figuring this out yourself, read on..." The article is located at Advogato. More porting tips at Fink's site.