And the winner of yesterday's Rekall competition is... Craig Knox (cknox AT environcorp DOT com). Congratulations Craig! Thank you everyone for participating!

The IRIX 6.5.18 release contains updates for both the maintenance and feature streams. This release continues the focus on stability, reliability, security and compatibility required in the IRIX 6.5.X quarterly release process. Approximately 118 customer reported incidents are fixed in this release.

Let's all have some fun and leave a comment about what we liked most in the OS scene this year!

GNU-Friends has an overview of Portable .NET, a key part of the DotGNU Project: "DotGNU aims to provide a complete alternative for all aspects of webservices, including user authentication (Virtual Identities), service directories, access, and security (SEE), as well as support businesses interested in using the Free DotGNU model." Additionally, the Mono Project released slides of their presentations.

Rekall is a database front-end. It is not itself a database -- data is stored somewhere else, in an SQL server, and Rekall is fundamentally just a tool to extract, display and update that data (of course, it does lots more than that, it does forms and reports and scripting and so on). It is database agnostic, and does not have any preferred database in the sense that Access uses the Jet database engine. TheKompany is giving away a free copy of the packaged version of Rekall (normally costs $80 USD) to a lucky winner. Read more to participate to the competition!

"I've recently installed both Gentoo 1.4 and Mandrake 9.0 (both bleeding edge distros). I'm not going to talk about the installation so much as the niceness factor. The niceness factor in my opinion is after doing a default install, how nice is it to use. Gentoo 1.4 hasn't been released yet, so things may change." Read the mini-review at NewsForge. The pluses for Mandrake installation are its speed and the absolute ease of obtaining and applying updates. It completely obliterates the Windows contenders in both the update category and the installation of attached devices. Read that article at LinuxWorld.

"One of the most intimidating things to new users about Linux is the layout of the file-system. Users who are learning to hack Linux have to just clench their teeth and learn their way around, but what about a user who just wants to send e-mails, browse the web and type up a few documents?" The rest is here.

"Just a cleanup over 63. The only code change was the pctel upgrade; didn't touch printing. Fixed automounter startup; fixed descriptive cups startup; fixed modprobe errors on boot; upgraded PCTel drivers to 0.9.6." Download the ISO here, report bugs here.

Ending nearly a year of debate with its users, Sun made available on its Web site an early access version of its Solaris 9 operating system that runs on Intel Corp. compatible processors. This is a beta version and it costs $20 USD to download. If you happen to get your hands to the beta and you would like to write a review of Solaris 9-x86, please do so, we will be happy to post it for you on OSNews.

SciTech Software today announced that Rocklyte Systems has licensed the SciTech SNAP Graphics engine for use in its latest release of Athene OS, a consumer operating environment that provides a completely object based and customizable user environment. Read more for the press release.

AMD has written some things lately, as well as Intel has in the past, pointing out that the difference between RISC and CISC no longer matter (in fact, modern x86 CPUs are largely RISC these days, except the memory interface). That CISC is catching up and surpassing RISC. iGeek looks at the facts.

Jacob writes: "The NomadBIOS project aims at making operating systems nomadic. It allows you to run several instances of Linux on the same box, and to migrate them almost without downtime between boxes. Recent performance measurements show that it handily beats beats VMWare for execution speed." A similar project is the UserMode Linux.

"Scalability enhancements, as well, will add to the appeal of the latest kernel, Version 2.6, for enterprise customers, according to Linus Torvalds, the creator and top programmer for the Linux kernel, in an e-mail exchange last week with eWeek. While he would like the 2.6 kernel to be ready early next year, Torvalds said, "It's just too hard to predict, and it does end up depending a lot on how good the vendors are at trying to calm things down through stability fixing."" Read the report at eWeek.

"The number of operating systems in the handheld market will increase next year with the release of the much-anticipated Symbian-powered devices. But, while Symbian was set to dominate the consumer space, analysts said, it would be a while before the operating system posed a real threat the dominance of Microsoft and Palm in corporate computing." Read the report at AustralianIT.