Before I get started on my views, I would like to point a few things out. I'm not in high school or college. I'm 35 years old and have been in the computer business a long time. My experience goes all the way back to the hey days of punch cards. I still have a few cards over at my folk's house. I think one of the 'programs' prints out a snoopy. I've worked for several large corporations including IBM and GTE. I'm bringing this up not to brag but to point out that I know a thing or two about computers. Now that that's out of the way, I'll continue.

"The plethora of Free Software applications available today, none working perfectly, is a problem which stands in the way of major adoption of Linux on the desktop. In order to conquer the desktop, we have to stand united." Read the controversial editorial at Freshmeat, by Marius Andreiana.

Microsoft Corp., bowing to federal government demands, will make it easier for computer users to substitute rival Web browsers for the company's Internet Explorer, people familiar with the matter said.

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies.

IBM today announced the availability of a 'special edition' of SciTech SNAP Graphics for OS/2. The SciTech System Neutral Access Protocol (SNAP) Graphics for OS/2 IBM Special Edition (a.k.a. SNAP Graphics/SE) is a set of graphic adapter device drivers (GRADD) supporting a variety of chip sets from the leading chip set manufacturers. SNAP Graphics/SE is the new compatible replacement for previous versions of SciTech Display Doctor for OS/2 IBM Special Edition (SDD/SE).

Nicolas writes: "This is an article I wrote with Fabien Vallon about GNUstep, published previously in Linux-mag in France, along with an interview of three core developpers of the GNUstep's project."

Slashdot carries a story about Sun trying to speed up the UI of Java applications by using native OS looks. Sun released J2SE version 1.4.2 beta1, release notes here. Footnotes ran an interview about the integration of Java and GTK+ and they feature three screenshots. In other developer/GTK+ news, Inti 1.0.7 is released. Inti is a C++ wrapper for GTK+ (similar to gtkmm).

Michael C. Barnes updates his in-depth look at leading desktop operating system options on the market. In this long 4-page exclusive article at DesktopLinux.com, Barnes addresses reader feedback to his popular first article and evaluates today's Linux distributions. Barnes offers practical considerations and discusses what software can best meet your home or office needs.

The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. Today, we talk to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson.

Microsoft on Tuesday said that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in April will certify Microsoft's programming language C# (pronounced C sharp) and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), which is underlying software "plumbing" that can run applications written in different programming languages.

The AROS team has updated their web site with new information about their operating system, plus a number of new screenshots. The team is also looking for active developers to help out the project.

Frank van der Linden has committed UFS2 code (based on FreeBSD's UFS2 by Marshall Kirk McKusick) to NetBSD. UFS2 is an extension to FFS. It adds 64 bit block pointers (breaking the 1T barrier) and support for extended file storage. On other BSD news, OpenBSD got a port of XFree86 4.3.0, while Kerneltrap features an article about the new 1:1 threading implementation that has been merged into FreeBSD -current.

This is by no means a technical review - it is just a summary of my experience as I was going along, installing and configuring a Red Hat Linux 9 machine. I installed the standard "workstation" installation on my 2 year old desktop machine. I like Gnome at home, KDE at work, but this review only covers my experience with the default Gnome installation.

The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) version 3.0 for Windows 2000-SP3/XP/Server-2003 contains the tools and documentation you need to design, deploy, and support applications on these platforms.