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.

The GNU-Darwin project is now considered stable and it has reached 1.0 status (it seems that the latest beta will be marked as 1.0). Download from here, packages, ports.

"I've been thinking about this at great length for the past year or so. The W.I.M.P. interface is going to be with us for a while no matter what we think of it. It will evolve and get enhanced by other developments in input devices (eye tracking, speech recognition, humanoid virtual androids, etc..), but will probably largely remain the same. The real "innovations" (for lack of a less used word) are to be had in new approaches to using the computer to actually get work done." The editorial can be found at the interesting NooFace web site.

The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

"Shortly after I lost the ALT-F-S feature in Microsoft Word last fall, I made a New Year's resolution to try out the Linux operating system. You read right: The keyboard "save" function in Word just went away one day. I tried reinstalling Word with Office, but nothing changed. Just chalk it up to another of those famously mysterious Windows "glitches."' Read the article at SeattleTimes.

"As the second victim in the TinyMinds interview series we have picked the SlicKer project as our target. SlicKer aims to someday replace Kicker in KDE with its own more task-oriented approach. Today we talk to one of it's developers; keyboard cowboy Shamyl Zakarika." Read the interview here. Our Take: I worked with Shamyl back in the early BeUnited days, just right after Deej and myself founded it (the goals for BU were different back then), and Shamyl was one of the very few developers (a total of 130+) who actually delivered what he said he would. I have faith on Shamyl's ability to deliver great apps.

Although open source databases are picking up steam in the commercial market, breaking into the enterprise market and competing with the likes of Oracle and IBM's DB2 will be tough. "This is rocket science," Aberdeen's Bill Claybrook said. In the meantime, the SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) addresses specific issues discovered in SQL Server 2000 since its ship date.

The company plans to update its Smartphone 2002 operating system to fix flaws that make it possible to send rogue software programs to a specific model of phone that uses the OS.

"OpenBSD 3.2 is with us, and it's time to upgrade our systems to the latest release. As usual, it is strongly suggested that you install the latest release on a spare machine, apply patches, and test it until you are happy with what the OpenBSD gang gave us. Only then you should upgrade and patch the production machine. But how do you patch OpenBSD?" Read the article at OnLamp.

"A year after Bill Gates called for Microsoft to make its products more "trustworthy," executives are touting myriad initiatives as proof of the software giant's new resolve. The company has spent millions to train staff in privacy concerns and secure programming, while building new tools and processes to help create reliable software. But critics--and Microsoft's own executives--said much more work remains." Read the report at ZDNews.

theKompany.com was initially into desktop applications but has turned its attention to the embedded market since 2001 and has just released a VoIP product, tkcPhone. Shawn Gordon was interviewed about the company, his work and general Linux issues, including KDE/Gnome and Red Hat 8 issues.

Ladislav Bodnar writes "Mandrake Linux 9.1, a GNU/Linux distribution in the making, is currently under intensive development. This review is an attempt to compare its first beta to Mandrake Linux 9.0, which I have been using for several months. What are the main improvements? The major difference as I can see between the two releases is that MandrakeSoft has updated practically all the packages in 9.0. In the process they have solved a number of small but annoying bugs that plagued 9.0, while keeping the qualities that users have come to appreciate in their various releases: ease of installation, speed and usability." Read the review at DistroWatch

"Even today, you can still get to a C: prompt under Windows XP, which means a disk operating system is hiding there no matter what Microsoft wants us to believe . Windows XP is not an operating system. It is a windowing system that sits atop an operating system much as KDE or Gnome sit atop Linux. . " Read the (funny?) editorial at I, Cringely.

Jasper Huijsmans has been working on a possible replacement for xfbd and xfdeskmenu, both parts of the XFCE desktop environment. Screenshot here. In the meantime, the Enlightenment project posted an update a few days ago. And here are some shots of the Evolution email client running on GTK+ 2.x.