Representatives of the Junta of Extremadura (regional government) announced that a sweeping initiative has put 80,000 computers in schools across that region running a special version of Linux, GNU/LinEx. Our Take: I wish the government in my home country, Greece, also put together cheap $199 PCs (plus $60 1024x768@75Hz 15" monitors) and give them away to high-schools. Problem is, we talk for at least $50m in hardware/support -- Greece is a poor country. With time I guess...

Hewlett-Packard apparently slipped up and revealed some of the specifications for AMD's upcoming Athlon64 chip, a processor that HP seems to be preparing to use in its PCs. Although the specifications fit within the expected performance range for the chip, the 1.8GHz speed and 3100+ model number may begin to raise questions about AMD's ability to keep up with Intel, C|Net says.

New features and many bug fixes/updates are seen in SkyOS way. New screenshots too.

Licensing doesn't really lock customers into a constant frenzied upgrade cycle of products they don't actually need. Read the article at Silicon.com.

Microsoft is breaking new ground with Longhorn, successor to XP. The upcoming WinFS file system will be the first to be context-dependent, and promises to make long search times and wasted memory a thing of the past. THG compares it to FAT and NTFS.

Mozilla 1.4-RC2 is released, release notes here.

Everyone knows what Microsoft does by now. What some people do not know is that Microsoft releases a system integration software named Windows services for UNIX.

The latest "SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux Beta" now provides plug-and-play support for more than 100 of the most popular chipsets, full 2D acceleration, and is certified by SciTech to be compatible with nearly a dozen different Linux distributions.

AmigaWorld.net has interviewed Matthew Kille, the founder of the software company Zeoneo who is also the designer of the default AmigaOS4 graphical user-interface. His company developes both for AmigaOS4 and the Amiga Digital Environment. Please note however that the currently presented AmigaOS4 GUI at various 'OS4 on Tour' events is not yet finalised. This includes a couple of the common UI components and the main overall color scheme.

From the dot: "Trolltech announced today that they will release a GPL version of Qt/Mac on June 23rd at the Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco taking their successful dual licensing strategy for Qt/X11 to the Mac. Also the upcoming Qt Script for Applications (QSA), Trolltech's scripting toolkit for Qt-based applications, will be available under a dual license on Mac OS X. Sam Magnuson from Trolltech already got much of KDE building on Qt/Mac a while ago (screenshots showing Konqueror, Kontact, Games and KOffice). The new license now offered allows to distribute binary builds of KDE for Qt/Mac soon." KDE aside, this will help many other developers to deliver multi-platform apps.

BeOS MaxEdition 3-beta1 is released (260 MB). This distribution of BeOS, based on BeOS 5 PE, has support for more hardware than the normal BeOS 5.0.3, including support for P4s and new AthlonXPs. Burning the booting image is a bit more involved than usual, as it is not a plain ISO image, so please read the readme file before burning the file. Elsewhere, there is a new donation project to help get OpenOffice ported over to the BeOS.

"Judging from the holy war being waged by proponents of Linux PCs, it's clear that Linux is becoming the OS/2 of its time." Read the article at Forbes. The article weighs the (mostly negative) reasons why a LinuxPC might not be what some people won't need.

Genesi has a promotion on Pegasos slashing prices down to 300 euro. A fair price to run MorphOS.

In light of our world's first preview of YellowTAB's Zeta OS many readers have completely misunderstood a few of the key points presented in the article. Instead of weigh the advantages and disadvantages of Zeta, they only kept in their minds the (so far) negative points. Zeta is still in beta and there is quite some work to be done to clean up before release. I compiled for you two sets of Top-10 reasons why all ex-BeOS users and all other OS enthusiasts should take a good look at Zeta and another set of 10 reasons of why Zeta might not be what you are looking for.