Sun Microsystems, Inc. today delivered on its redoubled commitment to the UNIX platform, extending the full benefits of the Solaris Operating System, to x86-based servers with the Solaris 9 x86 Platform Edition. Non-commercial usage is available at no charge, while commercial pricing starts at US $99; attractive OEM pricing is also available. Source code for Solaris will now be available.

The Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting is this weekend in Brussels, and they're published several more interviews with event contributors: Harald Welte about netfilter/iptables, Solar Designer about Openwall GNU/*/Linux, Yoann Vandoorselaere about Prelude IDS, Thomas Vander Stichele about GStreamer, and Damien Sandras about GnomeMeeting.

Microsoft Corp., trying to make up for the disappointing uptake of Windows Server 2000 and that software's headache-inducing Active Directory installation process, is expected to announce today tweaks to technology, programs and services for Windows Server 2003.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released PostgreSQL 7.3.2. This release addresses several overrun and memory leak issues that were found in recent weeks, so it is highly recommended that those running the 7.3.1 branch upgrade at their earliest convience.

Microsoft has issued two security advisories for widespread products: the Internet Explorer browser and Windows XP. The patch posted Wednesday points to a "critical" flaw in several versions of IE, regardless of the version of the Windows operating system it runs under. Microsoft also issued an alert regarding a less severe problem with Windows XP.

Leading Linux seller Red Hat is becoming more aggressive in pushing its premium operating system products, using support contracts, pricing changes and certification restrictions to drive customers and partners to its more expensive "advanced" line. Also, Sam's Club, the members-only branch of retail giant Wal-Mart, has entered the budget PC race with a $299 system running Red Hat Linux.

Announcement is here and the sources of Gnome 2.2 are available for downloading. Get more info about this version, and many screenshots here.

WSJ has an article on OpenBeOS featuring Michael Phipps, Timothy Lord from Slashdot and Eric Raymond. "As far as I can see, OpenBeOS is more an admirable aesthetic experiment," says Timothy Lord. "As it is," he adds, "they're esoteric among esoterica."

GCC 3.2.2 is now available from sites listed at here and here. This release is a bug-fix release in the GCC 3.2 series. There are no new major features; however there are many bugs fixed. More detail about this release is available here.

Vector Linux announced the release of version 3.2. The disto is now fully Slackware compatible and LSB compliant. It is based on the linux kernel 2.4.20 and Glibc-2.2.5. Several new additions to the software mix have been added such as CDRW support to burn cd's, faster web browsing via Dillo and the latest Opera , autopkg to keep things up to date, checkinstall for easy source installation, and additional security updates. Antialias font support is in both the available window managers. New in version 3.2 are new and enhanced configuration tools to make installation and hardware detection even easier.

"IMD for Linux (Indigo Magic Desktop) is going much further that those themes that simulate the IRIX look and feel. IMD for Linux has it own window manager that looks, behaves and provides the same features found on an IRIX box. Read more about the recreation of 4dwm desktop environment on Linux and how to beta test for the project.

GNOME 2.0 Desktop, the user environment for the Solaris OE, is now ready for production use. It has been built by Sun Microsystems and is fully supported. Additionally, Sun went beta with Star Office 6.1.

Omni Group is well known to most Mac users and NeXT ones back in the day. Omni Group today is a MacOSX-only company, writting high quality applications in Cocoa, apps like OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and 3D game ports. Today, we talked to its CEO, Ken Case, about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari and the future.

An insider at Sun says there's frantic discussion inside the company about big problems with the Java platform that, he claimed, "prevent general acceptance of Java for production software within Sun". He said: "It strikes me as hypocritical for Sun to blame Microsoft for any failure of the Java platform when Sun's own engineers find developing common software applications in Java impractical". One of the problems, he claimed, is that while Java has a lot of benefits compared to C and C++, its implementation on Solaris makes it difficult to deliver reliable applications. The Inquirer has the scoop.