Joel Konkle-Parker pointed us to ballsome.com where they are investigating Red Hat 8 as a possible replacement for Windows XP on the desktop. Our Take: It's a decent article that outlines a lot of known issues, but serves as a nice reminder we're close, but not there yet.

"This exciting project is designed to unify different operating system desktop interfaces into a browser only application interface. It helps users to feel comfortable with any application using the interface they are used to. It helps companies to unify their intranet applications into one desktop interface - built on existing interfaces or one which incorporates their own CI. It helps to design the same interface for all types of devices using browsers like PDA and other mobile devices, Notebooks, Desktops, Tablett Computers and any other future devices which may come up." Read more at x-desktop.org and definitely check out their demo!

Chrisime, member of the Gnome project, has put up a page discussing UI shortcomings on Gnome 2.2. Update: And here is another one, this time for Mandrake 9.1b3.

The space shuttle Columbia broke up Saturday as it descended over central Texas toward a planned landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Seven crew members were aboard. Many believe that a debris that hit some shielding during take off might be the culprit for the explosion during the return of the shuttle. Our condolences go out to the families of the brave astronauts.

James Maguire has written an article for osOpinion.com regarding the continuous industry move from Unix towards Linux based solutions: "As tech buying cycles progress, year by year, Linux will eat away at more of Unix' mission-critical work. That's because, at each new upgrade point, servers running Linux will grow ever more capable." As reported earlier IBM's top software executive recently stated that Linux is the 'Logical Successor' to IBM's Unix solutions.

Following in the footsteps of Hewlett Packard and DesktopLinux.com, Lycoris also announced that the company will withdraw itself from this LindowsOS.com, Inc. controlled event: "Lycoris originally joined the conference after assurances of balanced control and changes to the conference schedule including the addition of keynote speaker Bruce Perens and vendors like Hewlett Packard. The recent changes to the conference schedule, the withdraw of Hewlett Packard, and conference management have given a single-vendor too much focus which is no longer in the interest of Lycoris." In response LinuxToday.com has published an Open Letter directed towards the Lindows Corporation.

"One of the most important considerations in choosing an operating system for a new embedded platform is how long it takes to port the operating system to the hardware. If your hot, new product's hardware is six months ahead of the curve, but it takes you six months to port the software, you've lost your hardware advantage." Alistair Crooks, engineering director at Wasabi Systems, writes for EETimes.

Independent consultant Thomas E. Besemer writes for Embedded.com: "Is embedded Linux viable? You bet. Is it free? No way. If time-to-market matters, you get a lot from companies like Wind River with stable environments, or perhaps the current embedded Linux vendors." The December's article is accompanied by a number of insightful comments, and an additional response by the author.

The NetBSD Project announced that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been tagged and the release engineering process has begun.

From the OpenBSD Journal: In his post, Theo deRaadt gives a brief technical overview of the four major security changes in OpenBSD: POSIX page protection schemes, WorX, read only segments, and Propolice. Not all of these are on all platforms, but every platform has some protection. To quote Theo in his message, "We feel that these 4 technologies together will be a a royal pain in the a$$ for the typical buffer overflow attacker."

Until now, Sun Microsystems had a hands-off approach to the implementation of Java on mobile phones, which resulted in a chaotic and fractured Java implementation industry-wide, as different companies went their own way. Sun has taken the reigns and had proposed a road map, called "Java Technology for the Wireless Industry" or JTWI.

According to heise.de and news.com, AMD finalized their CPU roadmap this Friday. Opteron is scheduled for April, Athlon 64 for September. The Barton core will debut on Februar 10th in the Athlon XP 3000+. The Barthon increases the L2 cache from 256 (Thoroughbred-B) to 512 kByte, and will probably run only with FSB333. A Athlon XP 3200+ will probably appear by the middle of the year.

Why, you might ask, would anyone want to build their own operating system? It's really about being in control and knowing what's going on.In the next few paragraphs I'll explain what motivated me to take on this project, the recipe I used, and what I like about it.

Well, we all have used Unix, in one form or another (maybe even through embeded products). But which one is your favorite flavor of Unix-based/Unix-alike OSes? Read more and vote! Update: SHAME on you, who ever you are: Messing/hacking with go2poll's code and altering the results in favor of FreeBSD. By doing so, you are doing MORE BAD than good to your favorite platform.