Sun on Friday will announce plans to release an unbundled version of the Solaris 9 operating environment for non-Sun x86 hardware for $99 for a single CPU system. After months of indecision, Sun will now ship Solaris 9 x86, unbundled, supporting both the Sun hardware platform, for both current and future products, as well as the same list of all hardware supported for Solaris 8, according to Sun officials in Palo Alto, Calif. Early access to the Solaris 9 bits will come in the next four to eight weeks, and the final product will ship in the January time-frame, they said.

Microsoft released new beta versions of their programming .NET tools, including the .NET Framework and SDK 1.1 Beta and Visual J# Redistributable Package 1.1 Beta.

David Mosberger, developer of the initial GCC port to IA-64 and lead kernel architect for Linux on IA-64, tells us why you should care about Intel's new 64-bit chip.

From Slashdot: "NetBSD-current for the i386 architecture now has SMP. (It used to be that only FreeBSD had this feature among the free BSDs.) See the announcement on the current-users list."

It is always an honour to interview people who have 'served' and worked on operating systems at the "golden" times of the operating systems, the '80s and pre-Win9x days. Today we interview Adam de Boor, who was the CTO at GeoWorks, developers of the GEOS, in the begining of the last decade. Adam today works for OpenWave Systems. We discuss about GeoWorks, its past, its future, where it should have been.

Like the PR headaches with KDE were not enough for Red Hat, now it seems that Taiwanese people are unhappy because their flag was left out of the KDE control panel, while it was there by default. Also, "in a surprising move they've completely broken with their previous policy of 100% open source. The new distribution contains a few components which are (C) Red Hat and are *not* freely re-distributable", the Linux Emporium claims. Discussion about the issue here and here.

"I sat down at my Macintosh at home to do some photo editing when I realized the pictures I wanted were on a Windows computer. Although the two machines are just a few feet from each other, moving the files from one to the other would, until recently, have required me to copy the pictures to some sort of removable storage unit, probably a recordable CD. Then plunk that into the Mac." Read the article at BusinessWeek.

Mungi is a 64-bit, single-address-space, capability-based operating system designed to easily support distribution and persistence. The initial public release is now available as GPLed source, and runs on the L4/MIPS (R4x00 CPU) and L4/Alpha (21164 & 21264 CPU) microkernels. This release features a mostly complete kernel, user-level libraries for POSIX support, and some initial application code. It lacks device drivers, persistence, mandatory access control, and a raft of other features currently under development.

A few months ago we were discussing the upcoming release of WindowFX2 from Stardock, which was to utilize the graphics 3D hardware to render cool animations and transitions on your Windows. WindowFX2 is now out, there is a demo, and a very cool video where you can see the new, very cool transitions in action.

In the '90s, before MacOSX was released, if people were to reffer to a user-friendly Unix that looked cool at the time, that would have been SGI's 64-bit operating system for the MIPS processors, the IRIX. IRIX was first released in 1987, and by 1995 was already a highly respected UNIX, the first with immense multimedia capabilities! Check out our introduction and some screenshots of IRIX.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1 beta2, the third development release of a significant feature upgrade for KDE 3. KDE 3 is the third generation of KDE's free, Internet-enabled desktop for Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.1, scheduled for final release in October 2002, will provide substantial improvements to the KDE desktop experience. As the KDE 3 API is frozen for binary compatibility, KDE 3.1 will be binary compatible with KDE 3.0.

Enterprises tend to choose Linux because they must consider the availability of professional service, the IT learning curve, and standards and interoperability, the Yankee Group's Laura DiDio said. Read the article at NewsFactor.

"Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and others are just starting to bless us with a new round of desktop-oriented distributions – aka "distros". If you're finally considering Linux as a desktop OS, congratulations! And don't fret, we're here to help." Read Jim Lynch's article for ExtremeTech.

"My initial reaction to the Mandrake desktop was no different than before. The Mandrake desktop is fairly basic, maybe even ugly. First I installed the Windows fonts, then upgraded Freetype to enable the bytecode interpreter and things started looking a lot better. Then, I headed to pclinuxonline.com and downloaded some KDE and Gnome themes that Texstar has provided for Mandrake 9.0. KDE started looking as beautiful as my 8.2 install. To get a clean and consistent desktop, I use the Bluecurve theme that Texstar has provided from Redhat." Read it at RatedPC.