MadPenguin is reviewing the latest version of ArkLinux, 1.0a7. Recently, we hosted an interview with Bero, project leader of the ArkLinux distribution.

Virtual Dimension has released an English version of their Amiga + Retro-Computing 2002 show report. New products which were sold at this small fair, include AmigaOne systems running Linux, Pegasos systems running MorphOS and even a new C64 compatible Retro motherboard, called the c-one, was being presented at the fair. Regarding the AmigaOne motherboards, initial G3/G4 benchmark comparisons are now available.

MorphOS-News.de reports that Martin Heine has published some screenshots of MorphOS from CeBIT. For the first time you can now also see screenshots of Win32 Apps running on MorphOS. Bochs on MorphOS/Pegasos (G3 600) needs around 80 seconds to load Windows and around 20 seconds to start Word. Here is also a high res picture of the Pegasos machine. MorphOS-News.de also reports that it was also announced that the ProStationAudio Platinum will be included with MorphOS.

Scott Long recently posted this year's first FreeBSD status report. The document begins with a quick look at the recently released FreeBSD 5.0, then looks to the future roadmap with the 5.1 maintenance release coming within a couple of months, and the stable 5.2 release by the end of the summer. Also mentioned is the upcoming 4-STABLE release, 4.8 (24th March), which includes XFree86 4.3 and support for HyperThreading. Read the detailed report at KernelTrap.

The PCQuest magazing folks have created their own distribution, PCQ Linux 8.0, based upon Red Hat's 8.0 Linux. Read the introductory article about their distro at PCQuest.com.

With the recent beta release of Microsoft Office 2003 out the door earlier this week, many customers got their first look at what Microsoft hopes will re-write the office productivity landscape with a new ecosystem of collaborative functionality based on XML (define). But will organizations have to buy into an entirely Microsoft architecture to tap it? That's the contention of Gary Edwards, a Web app. design consultant and OpenOffice.org's representative on the OASIS OpenOffice XML Format Committee.

Due to the recent hype surrounding LindowsOS I decided to take it out on a test-drive. And despite some bumps in the road, it all went pretty smoothly. Here is my review:

Slackware Linux 9.0 RC-3 is now available: Changelog, mirror list, direct download dir. Updates include automake 1.7.3, Nautilus 2.2.2 and Mozilla 1.3, but the qt library was kept at 3.1.1: "This was recommended by several people as an important fix for Opera, but installing it causes all kinds of display problems with KDE (particularly with fixed fonts such as the one used by Konsole). If you care more about Opera than KDE, you might want to install this, otherwise it's probably a bad idea." Update: ISO download (nightly builds) can be found here or here or here.

NewMobileComputing is reporting that a new version of The Linux-Mobile-Guide, a manual covering laptop and PDA related Linux features, is now available.

This (kind of old but interesting) article gives you an overview of the Eclipse Platform, including its origin and architecture. Starting with a brief discussion about the OSS nature of Eclipse and its support for multiple programming languages, it then demonstrates the Java development environment with a simple program example. The article also surveys some of the software development tools that are available as plug-in extensions and demonstrates a plug-in extension for UML modeling. Info/shots of Linux version.

Mozilla 1.3 is released today and includes a number of new features and bug fixes. Update: On other browser news, Opera Software released Opera 7.03 for Windows and a preview release for Linux and FreeBSD. The OmniGroup released OmniWeb 4.2b2 recently as well.

A KDE developer tipped me off to a recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.

Kondra Systems, just released a powerful virtual machine and C runtime combination that offers pre-emptive threads, virtual filesystem, floating point emulation, dynamic linker/loader, and true binary compatibility across all platforms in a 64k package.

Although it's among the market leaders in the low-end server business, Sun Microsystems Inc. has in recent years been known much more for its success at the high end. In this interview with Computer World, Neil Knox, executive vice president of Sun's volume systems product group, talked about his company's recent blade-server product launch, its emerging throughput computing strategy and Linux.