"Apple Computer has quietly extended an overture to the Unix community, with the release of software that would make it easier for Unix applications to run on the Mac operating system." Read the interesting article at News.com. "The XFree86 Project had been working on a port for OS X, and Apple "took the ball and ran with it a little further and integrated it more tightly into the system. We also made it easier to download," Apple's Brian Croll said." NewsFactor has a similar story too. Update: Another Mac editorial today, this time a bit more controversial though.

SCO Group has hired high-profile attorney David Boies to see whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and versions of BSD infringe on Unix intellectual property the company owns.

"Robertson isn't the only one hoping to cash in. Software companies like Red Hat, Mandrake, and Suse all offer Linux products that compete with Windows. But Lindows has a few things those companies don't: It has Robertson's bombastic personality to sell it, and it has a better pitch--that it is easier to install and use. Wal-Mart, which began selling Lindows-ready PCs on its website in September, has had such success with the offering that by Christmas it was having trouble meeting demand." Read the two-page interview with Lindows' CEO at Fortune. Robertson also appeared on TV.

We spoke with Bill Moffitt, Product Line Manager for Solaris at Sun Microsystems. The second update to Solaris, called Solaris 9 12/02, was released this month. (Sun puts the month and year of the release date after the version number. Apparently, it was "released" in December, but don't ask why it was only made available a few days ago). In addition to bug fixes and updates that you would expect in a release like this, Sun has included a couple of big extras for capability and performance.

SuSE Linux Office Desktop is intended for small companies looking for an easy, preconfigured desktop -- as well as for personal users with little or no Linux experience. The product is based on SuSE Linux 8.1 and it costs $129 USD. ITWeek already has a mini-review.

In the first part of this series, Andrew D. Balsa looked at Mandrake Linux 9.1 and its initial beta release. Despite quite a few critical bugs, he was impressed with the progress and most charmed by the new KDE 3.1. When Mandrake released the second beta, he rushed to do another installation and these are his experiences, together with some impressive new screenshots.

Thanks to Warren and Edgan who sent us two screenshots from the latest Red Hat beta released today. Warren sent us a KDE shot and Edgan sent us the modified Red Hat menu (a positive change if we might say, without the "Extras"). Update: A quick suggestion mockup for the menu.

Earlier this week, Apple seeded pre-release versions of the v10.2.4 update to Mac OS X, both client and server. Both seeds of 10.2.4, known internally as "Jaguar Pink," were numbered build 6I13. Apple also has been writing drivers for a number of popular sound and video cards. With the release of 10.2.3, support was added for SoundBlaster Extigy, and as of last month, work was nearly complete on Audigy and Audigy 2 drivers. As for video cards, Apple is planning to support several workstation-quality graphics cards in 10.3, that weren't previously supported, including full support for NVidia Quadro 980, 900, and 750XGL. Support will also be added for ATI's top-end Fire GL series.

"Last week I had the luck to be sent to CES with the mission of walking around looking at what is there with a view to picking up ideas, suppliers and generally seeing who's doing what." Nicholas Blachford from Genesi is writting his impressions from CES.

"Linux distributions have a wide variety of features that can make choosing the right one for your needs a daunting task. The larger distribution companies try to be the "one size fits all" solution while the less known distribution projects and companies tend to focus on their advantage over the big guys. In this article, we hope to give you a road map for your Linux distribution decisions by showing you some common and unique traits among Linux distributions." On other Linux news, Tux Reports has published an At-A-Glance look at the ALT Linux Master 2.2 beta (note: TuxReport's Birdie is 11 years old and has used Linux for 3 years. She has installed dozens of Linux distributions!).

With the emergence and popularity of Knoppix, a universal "run-from-CD" Linux distribution, it is too easy to forget about all other Linux-on-CD projects. And there are plenty of them. Some are designed to demonstrate the power of Linux to unsuspecting users of other operating systems, while others are highly specialised projects useful even to experienced Linux gurus. They range from emergency rescue and system diagnostics CDs to multimedia oriented projects that transform a diskless or OS-less computer into a full home theatre. Each of these projects has a unique feature, a merit and a niche to fill. Let's take a brief look at each of them.

Node monitoring is that most BeOS-esque of system services that allows applications to offload the task of watching files and directories for changes. It provides the basis of "live" queries and folders, etc. Axel Dörfler (author of OpenBFS) has checked in a first version document for describing the kernel implementation of node monitoring for OpenBeOS.

We recently reported on the possibility of Apple acquiring Gobe Productive 3, and we suggested caution on the rumors. Yesterday, MacRumors quoted Bob Hearn regarding the issue (ex-Claris/Gobe employee), who says that the 3 ex-Gobe employees now at Apple, have nothing to do with a possible GP3 port, and they don't even work on AppleWorks' codebase (ex-ClarisWorks, which was also developed by Gobe back in the day as "Claris Inc"), but on other projects. Surfing around the MacRumors site, I came across an article regarding the USB-2 status on Macs. On other office suite news, OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 is available (release notes here) but no official announcement is out yet.

Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers.