Lindows 3.0 promises fast installations, easy updates, and an interface built to please. Seth Fogie takes a closer look at this operating system to determine whether Lindows has accomplished its goal. Free registration required to read the article.

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?

"If there is one thing I can say about SuSE Linux, it's that they know how to put together a desktop distro. This has been evident for quite some time, and nothing has changed. Their new Office Desktop release is built upon the solid foundation that is SuSE's desktop expertise." Read the review at MadPenguin.

"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.

"Since my good old Pentium 166 days, I've liked to search for the best optimizations possible so programs can take the maximum advantage of hardware/CPU cycles. If I have a nice piece of hardware, why not run it at its full power, using every little feature? Shouldn't we all try to get the best results from the money invested in our machines?" Read the article at FreshMeat.

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

The new FreeBSD 4.8 Release schedule has been announced. Hidetoshi Shimokawa has added new functionality to Firewire on this scheduled FreeBSD 4.8 release. New features include built-in DV support, improved recovery process & timeout stability and Write/ioctl support for /dev/fwmem0. He has not tested this on PAL and is looking for volunteers.

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.

Red Hat and Intel have settled a licensing hiccup that threatened to prevent the Linux company from contributing to Intel's open-source project--a reminder of the frictions that can arise between the commercial tech world and the open-source community.

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.

At January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, PC Magazine editor-in-chief Michael Miller talked with Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates. The conversation ranged from Tablet PCs and Microsoft's effort—dubbed SPOT—to infuse watches and other everyday objects with online intelligence, Longhorn, to a slated Xbox Live showdown between Gates and NBA star Shaquille O'Neal. "I'm a little worried," Gates conceded, regarding the face-off with Shaq.

"Andrew Zamler-Carhart of KavaSoft, maker of iConquer, was kind enough to answer our questions this week, and here on a Friday morning, we're posting them for our inquisitive readers. He talks about the upcoming version 2 of iConquer, Rendezvous technology in MacOS X and the perils of being a game programmer." Read the full interview at MacSlash.

Plexuscom, a designer and manufactures of broadband Internet access solutions and appliances, has reached an agreement with Genesi Sarl to produce and deliver limited quantities of the PegasosPPC computer for release at CeBIT 2003. Genesi and Plexuscom will share a Booth at CeBIT, 12-19 March in Hannover, Germany. Read the specs and see the pictures at the morphos-news.de site.

"When Sun Microsystems got started in 1982, companies such as Wang and Data General dominated the hardware business. In less than a decade, this upstart Unix outfit was a billion-dollar-plus phenom while the once-mighty minicomputer makers had been consigned to irrelevance." Read the commentary on ZDNews and a comment a few days ago, explaining Sun's Linux strategy, which is different of what IBM, DELL or HP does with Linux. Also, another Sun article says that Java servers feel the open source heat.