Mandrake Linux 9.0 from MandrakeSoft has established a reputation for being one of the easiest to install and user-friendly Linux distribution (often called a distro) on the market. That reputation is well deserved, and the latest release continues to improve on what has been previously offered. Like SuSE 8.1, Mandrake 9.0 has excellent documentation, designed with the beginner in mind. allowing the inexperienced or potential Linux user to easily install a system. Read the article at ExtremeTech.

Contrary to popular belief, the cops will not arrest you if you don’t use Windows. There are some interesting alternative operating systems out there —and with perseverance, you won’t go crazy trying to use them. Chief among them is Linux, the largely free, enormously geek-popular system that hard-line anti-Windows users rave about, which has Tux the penguin as its mascot. Read the rest here.

I haven't been in the Amiga scene for quite some years now as I have long since left for the shores of planet BeOS. However I recently had the chance to re-enter the Amiga World at an Amiga show in the South-East of France when I went to meet a potential employer - after being "discovered" on OSNews! You'd think that a computer which hasn't shipped in years would have a small dwindling community. If you thought that well, you'd be wrong. This show dwarfs the BeOS BeGeistert shows I go to in Germany. Yet, Begeistert is for all of Europe and held every 6 months, this was just one French Amiga show and they are held around Europe nearly every week.

A new release for the JTMOS. The changes are, according to Jari's changes description to Freshmeat, "A TCP/IP stack (uIP) has been added. JTMOS now answers to ICMP pings. Major fixes were made in the SLIP driver. A working and usable WWW server was added and tested. A telnet server has been introduced. Many interrupt related problems have been fixed. A snake game called 'Greedy Snake' has been ported to JTMOS. Split partitioning support for the first floppy disk drive was added, which allows a file system to be placed on the same disk as the system loader and system image."

The £250 PC hasn't been part of the British computing landscape since the days of the eight-bit micro. Evesham Technology has changed that, with the launch of the E-scape Li -- no monitor or speakers, but everything else you need for a working computer. It includes, for the first time in the UK market, a version of Linux aimed at the consumer, Lindows. Read the review of the machine and OS at ZDNet.

X Resize and Rotate is an extension to X which allows resizing, rotating, reflecting, and changing the refresh rate of each screen of an X display on the fly. The extension has recently been committed to XFree86; the next version, 4.3 is planned for release this year. Hamish Rodda commited a user interface for this extension to kdenonbeta/kcmrandr. Screenshots here, discussion here.

In this second and final part of my interview with Ted Shelton, Borland's chief strategy officer, Shelton focuses on Microsoft .Net's support for multiple languages and reveals a hidden .Net stumbling block. First part here.

Mozilla 1.2-Beta and Phoenix 0.3 browsers were recently released. Additionally, Opera Software released beta versions of 6.1 for Linux, Linux PPC and FreeBSD. Also, the Dillo web browser's CVS seems to not have any check-ins for 3 months now, so if you want to code for a small and fast browser for Unix, here's your chance.

"In the last few articles, I've concentrated on configuring a FreeBSD system and various applications suited for multimedia. I'll wrap up that series today by tweaking a browser's plug-in support and installing some apps which can be either called by a browser or used on their own." Read the article at ONLamp.

Is open source software more secure? To most Linux enthusiasts, the answer is obvious: open source means more people can look for bugs and a faster dissemination of bug fixes. Obviously, yes. But noted security expert Gene Spafford says that this may not necessarily be true. According to the Purdue professor of computer science and co-author of Practical Unix & Internet Security, good security begins with good design and neither Windows nor Linux have much to brag about in that category.

"SuSE Linux 8.1 Pro is the latest Linux distribution release for the desktop and corporate users. With a wide variety of desktop applications, a sleek desktop, a dead easy to use control center and strong focus on security, this is one of the best Linux distros we've tried to date." Read the review at RatedPC.

MandrakeSoft released Linux Mandrake 9.0 about three weeks ago. How does this version compares to the also recent SuSE and Red Hat releases? MandrakeSoft sent us the Download Edition over for a review and here is what we think about it.

From BSDForums: Marko Zec has setup patches against FreeBSD 4.7 kernel sources, which provide the functionality of maintaining multiple independent network stack images within a single operating system kernel. No userland patches are necessary, except an additional virtual image management util.

As Microsoft awaits court approval of its landmark antitrust settlement with the government, the company has angered some competitors by tightly limiting the technical data it promised to release. Microsoft says the restrictions are normal for the software industry and do not violate the terms of the settlement. But competitors contend that Microsoft's actions are reminiscent of the behavior that led to the antitrust case and reinforce their claim that the entire settlement is inadequate.