Unununium, and interesting project which aims at producing an 'organic' operating system where all components are interchangable at run-time, recently put a screenshot online.They have been making a lot of progress lately, with the website becoming increasingly active and filled with content. This project is a bookmark must-have for any assembly buffs out there as it is entirely written in assembly.

Ximian Desktop 2 came out of few days ago and I gave it a go. This is not a usability experts review, and probably more of a first impressions thing than a review. I consider myself an intermediate user, (probably advanced intermediate). I installed Ximian Desktop on the following computer:

Sun Microsystems is working with numerous industry partners to support the use of scripting languages in its Java platform. Sun and Zend are leading the effort, which will create a way for developers to write Java applications using popular scripting languages like PHP, ECMAscript, and ASP. According to O'Reilly, Sun could boost its number of Java developers by another 3 million in this way. Elsewhere, Sun's CEO Scott McNealy defended the business merits of his company's Java effort, saying that, despite disappointing sales of Sun's own Java software, the effort has helped keep Microsoft at bay.

Today we host an interview with Kristian "Vanders" Van Der Vliet, project leader of the open source OS Syllable. Syllable was born from the ashes of AtheOS just about a year ago and today has evolved to version 0.4.4, released just a few days ago. Read more for the interview and 5 screenshots of the latest version of the promising OS.

Microsoft's embedded group announced a new "kitting program" today which enables its embedded hardware partners to bundle free Windows CE .NET or Windows XP Embedded toolkits and runtime images with up to 1,000 of their hardware evaluation or development platforms. More details are here.

"We all know what its like to imerse one's self in the age old computer market-share debate. The problem is that when most people use the word "market-share", what they really mean is "installed-base." Because consumers choose a platform based on its popularity, misconceptions about market-share only confuse the issue even further." Read the editorial at OSCast.

Here is a review with screenshots of the i686-optimized Red Hat-based JAMD Linux 0.0.6, and a review of the mainland European language-focused Aurox Linux 9 while Rock Linux released version 2.0.0-b4.

Another major hardware maker is likely to be added to SCO's legal battle against IBM and others over what it claims is illegally appropriated source code in Linux. In the meantime, Novell backs off copyright claims against SCO.

"In this letter you will find the result of a brief security audit that we did some time ago for HP-UX platform. We have found 8 vulnerabilities (seven local and a remote one). Technical details about all of the vulnerabilities were sent to the HP security team few months ago and in all cases appropriate security patches are available. Some of them are available for download right now, the remaining ones will be published in the near future." Read the security update here.

"It was the leading supplier of the computer servers that fueled the dot-com boom, the Silicon Valley star whose name was nearly synonymous with New Economy chic. But after two years on the bleeding edge of the bust, Sun Microsystems Inc. has fallen victim to the commoditization of the computers that do corporate America's heavy lifting." Read the article at Boston.com.

One of the most prominent ex-Be engineers back in the "golden days" of Be, Inc., Jean-Baptiste Queru, comments (and here) on beta 5 of YellowTAB's Zeta, an upcoming commercial version of BeOS based on a 2 year-old unfinished Dano/EXP codeline (that was supposed to be 'BeOS 6' if Palm hadn't bought the Be IP). JBQ finds the bloat & the lack of innovation dissapointing compared to what older versions of BeOS offered in their own timeline: "BeOS was about being one step ahead, not one step behind".

Hobby OS TriangleOS now sports a new ATA driver and a FATxx filesystem addon.

Apple resellers are becoming increasingly disgruntled with the product expansion and aggressive pricing of the vendor’s online presence, Apple Store. While a level playing field exists for hardware – allowing resellers to take advantage of face-to-face contact with customers and value-added service levels behind the sale – channel partners are worried about discrepancies appearing in the pricing of some third-party software and peripherals.

Lasse Christiansen has a Linux desktop dream. This lengthy opinion column at DesktopLinux.com provides Christensen's perspective on Linux usability, application support, and more.