"There aren't many major changes, just a bunch of minor tweaks. Most of these are welcome additions though. The one gripe I have is that Red Hat doesn't seem sure if they want to have this be a desktop for the average, not-very technical person (e.g., they hide the boot messages) or be one for the more advanced or technical user (e.g., Emacs is installed by default for a personal desktop)." Read the review at Linux-Universe. Screenshots are here.

Pixelglow Software announced the availability of macstl 0.1 -- a new C++ source library.

Researchers outline a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds from 1 minute 41 seconds.

These AROS mpeg videos are made by Paul Gallant and show the AROS operating system running a few demos and Directory Opus. Higher quality versions of the videos are planned soon too.

REAL Software announced that the next version of REALbasic will generate native applications for Linux (in addition to Mac Classic, Mac OS X and Windows). The IDE is not ported, you will have to cross-compile a Linux binary. And they now have a Visual Basic migration tool that will help developers port their VB applications to these other platforms.

Bare Feats has some interesting benchmarks to show: Fastest G5 so far to the fastest G4 MP. G5 is much faster on memory operations, but not all operations are faster than the G4. Bare Feats says that until developers optimize their code for the G5, users won't see G5 being speedier than G4 on all tests. Same thing happens with all new CPUs though, including the P4s which included a new instruction set and developers had to compile for it in order to take advantage of what it really had to offer.

Gtkmm is a C++ interface for popular GUI library gtk+. gtkmm provides convenient interface for C++ programmers to create graphical user interfaces with Gtk's flexible OO framework. Highlights include type safe callbacks, widgets extensible using inheritance and over 110 classes that can be freely combined to quickly create complex user interfaces. gtkmm is free software distributed under LGPL. Read the announcement of Gtkmm 2.2.5 here.

"Let's get over Linus Torvalds' old "world domination" goal (which was a joke), stop gnashing our teeth over The Evils of Microsoft, and think rationally about what percentage of the world's desktops we really need to switch to Linux. I figure 10% would be a minimum, and 20% would be more than enough. Enough for what? For everything we really want." Read the editorial at NewsForge by Roblimo.

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.

Red Hat Linux 9.0.93 beta, codenamed "Severn", was released today. Read more for a quick commentary and six screenshots of the release.

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.

John "Hannibal" Stokes has interviewed Pete Sandon, the PowerPC 970's main designer, and David Edelsohn, a compiler writer from IBM, and clarified several points about the 970 regarding group formation, vector issue queues and performance, and more.

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.

With 35 years of success under its belt, Intel needs to figure out how to diversify & create new markets.