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.

AmigaWorld.net has posted 5 new official AmigaOS4 screenshots. The latest shots show several appearance differences regarding the GUI. Saturday there's an AmigaOS4 on Tour event planned to be held in Augsburg, Germany.

Having written open source software myself, and being a subscriber to mailing lists, etc, there is a realization that the number one thing missing from smaller open source projects is feedback from users.

"Technical muscle and a history of innovation made Sun a Silicon Valley standard-bearer. It also blinded famously combative Scott McNealy to the coming Linux wars. Now he's fighting to survive." Read the article at Wired.

The Linux kernel 2.4.21 has seen a number of cleanups, and a patch which increasing performance of the system under heavy disk IO, especially on IDE systems. Changelog here.