The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0 "Mighty Atom", is ready for your bug-busting and testing. A few new modules were added to this dev beta of Gnome for testing: battfink (energy saving and battery tool), fontilus, galeon, gcalctool, gnome-mag (desktop magnification tool), gok ('GNOME On-screen Keyboard', an accessibility tool), gpdf, gucharmap (unicode character map tool), nautilus-cd-burner, themus (theme management), zenity.

"When I interviewed Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell last August, he hinted at a blurring of the lines between Linux and Solaris, if not an outright merger. Said Gingell: "Five years from now, when all the tribes intermarry, who is going to know what's Solaris and what's Linux, and who's going to care?" Read the editorial at ZDNews.

I was desperately looking for something to write about when I happened to chance upon Apple’s new shipping system – a dual 1.42GHz Power Mac G4. A new system, a faster system, but does it mean a brighter future for Apple?

Microsoft Corp. "dropped the other shoe" today, as it were, announcing the first source code sharing program for its Windows CE embedded operating system that allows developers and manufacturers to actually redistribute modified OS code in real products. Read the report at WindowsForDevices.

OSNews' sister web site NewMobileComputing posted the experiences of a reader with Apple's service department over the support of an iBook.

It's still a ways off, but when Solaris 10 arrives, Sun Microsystems will ship the OS with a new type of partitioning technology called Solaris Zones. Read the report at TheRegister.

I have read many OS/distribution reviews in the last couple of years, but it always seems like it is distros like Red Hat, SuSe and Mandrake (and the fairly new distro, Lindows) that get all the attention. The light has sometimes moved towards other less "user friendly" distros as Slackware, Debian and so forth, but the main concern of the authors has always been the distros meant to be used by Joe User.

The Microsoft .NET Framework SDK version 1.1 includes everything developers need to write, build, test, and deploy .NET Framework applications—documentation, samples, and command-line tools and compilers. You must install the .NET Framework Redistributable Package version 1.1 prior to installing the .NET Framework SDK. The Microsoft Visual J# .NET version 1.1 Redistributable Package includes everything you need to run your Visual J# .NET applications on a computer that already has the Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 installed.

"Red Hat has become one of the most widely deployed Linux distributions in the Enterprise space, and has long been a favorite of Linux devotees. Red Hat 8 introduced a new Gnome-based GUI that gave the OS a unique look and feel, and the company has continued to add more proprietary configuration tools designed to make system tweaking a graphical, rather than a command-line process." Read the article at ExtremeTech.

Microsoft plans to deliver two specialized versions of its Windows operating system software for AMDs' forthcoming 64-bit processors. Full announcement here.

Today, we host a mini-interview with Fink's project leader, Max Horn. The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. They modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management and you can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source.

On a normal system, if an attacker gains root or administrator access, he or she can run rampant. Not so on a trusted system -- at least so long as it is properly configured. Read the article at NewsFactor.

Dirk Meyer helped rescue Advanced Micro Devices from a tight spot once before. Now the company is hoping he can do the trick again. In his interview to ZDNet, he talks about the Opteron version of Windows, the Linux support for it, Athlon64 and more.

"Organizations can beneficially and successfully make the switch to Linux on the Desktop by keeping in mind two core factors. By applying the foundational principals behind two factors, even the most techno-phobic and proprietary software entrenched small sized companies can painlessly move to Linux on the Desktop." Read the story at ReallyLinux.