FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely announces that FreeBSD 4.8-RC1 i386 mini ISO and FTP installation directory are on ftp-master. He says that the Alpha release will be available shortly. The plan is to make FreeBSD 4.8 available only for i386 and alpha platforms. Subsequent 5.1+ releases will have FreeBSD available for all platforms including sparc64, ia64, etc. Read the announcement at BSDForums.org.

Frank writes: "A new beta recently appeared from RedHat and this article has in-depth analysis of the release and finds many different problems with it." Please note that OSNews also published a preview of Red Hat 8.1-Phoebe3 a few days ago, accompanied by screenshots.

Recently, Sun Microsystems Inc. hosted its annual analyst conference in San Francisco. The company faces high-end competition from IBM Global Services and low-end competition from companies including Dell Computer Corp. offering clustered systems running the Linux operating system. While not dismissive of the threats posed by the competition, Sun President Scott McNealy in a one-hour interview with eWEEK Editor-in-Chief Eric Lundquist and Labs Director John Taschek contended that the company is poised to capitalize on the research and development efforts launched over the past several years.

If you are reading this, I assume you already know what the Linux kernel is and why you may want to update it. However, if you are accidentally reading this walkthrough, just happen to be running Linux, and have no idea what the kernel is or why you would want to update it, the next two paragraphs are for you (if you are looking instead into a less verbose and more generic way of updating your kernel on any Linux distro, read here). In a neophyte nutshell, the Linux kernel is the brain of the Linux system. It tells your system which file systems, hardware, protocols, etc. are supported. There is a lot more to it than that, of course, but I think that diminutive description will suffice for now.

Hyperthreading moves into hyperspeed throughout 2003, with the Canterwood and Springdale chipsets forming the backbone of Intel's desktop roadmap. According to Intel roadmaps seen by ExtremeTech, Intel's desktop processors will extend up to and possibly beyond 3.6-GHz by the beginning of 2004, with Celerons cresting 2.5-GHz by the same timeframe. Await soon an article regarding hyperthreading, here on OSNews.

VMWare released a beta of their flagship application, VMWare 4.0 Build 4183. The new version includes support for new versions of Linux and Windows OSes, better VESA BIOS, ACPI and APIC support, better sound, new interface under Linux and more. In the meantime, the OpenOSX company released recently "WinTel", a re-packaged version of Bochs for MacOSX, with a new easy to use interface.

"I have a Pentium 3 866MHZ CPU. After reading the freshmeat article on optimizing GCC a few days ago, it got me thinking. So I posed the following question: How much faster would gcc compile the kernel if gcc itself was optimized?" Read the rest at Linux Gazette.

"KDE is delivering a better version of what GNOME's goal has apparently morphed into: becoming a great component framework that you can write to in multiple languages. Nicholas Petreley rebuffs the common GNOME battle slogans and explains why the window-manager's name needs reworking." Read the article at LinuxWorld. Commentary Update by Eugenia: The author of that article advocates that Gnome is... lame, but I would just say that these wars "gnome vs kde" are the lame ones.

NeoWin reports that they got their hands on a new leaked version of Windows Longhorn, the next big version of Windows. Commentary: The reporter insists that these are original shots. Lots of grandients are going on in the UI and while this is an alpha and the final version might look different (that's what happened with XP's Luna, MS only revealed XP's final design only a few months before the release, while most betas used another theme), these shots showing there are just pretty ugly IMHO. Bad taste on colors, no easy distinction between elements, it all looks like a big bad web page.

Hewlett-Packard and IBM tied for first place in the hotly contested Unix server market in the fourth quarter of 2002, pushing aside Unix heavyweight SUN, according to a new study released Friday.

"Microsoft on Friday signed a pact with the Chinese government to reveal the Windows source code, making China among the first to benefit from its program to allay the security fears of governments. In addition, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates hinted that China will be privy to all, not just part, of the source code the government wishes to inspect. " Read the rest at ZDNet.

This is an update release targetting bug fixes and new optimizations. It does not change the functionality of original 1.4.1 release. Check out the release notes and/or download new Java VM. In a related note, the Java porting team at beunited.org reports that they have reached a significant milestone. The java and javac programs are now building under BeOS.

In this guest column at DesktopLinux.com, former SCO evangelist and Samba.org team leader John H. Terpstra weighs in on market perceptions about Linux and its suitability for the desktop. Interviewing a sample group –- that included 30 people evenly split in the Linux and MS camps -- Terpstra discovered each group cited the very same arguments in defending their OS of choice! The author sought definitive answers about the state of Desktop Linux and reasons for and against a switch to Linux. The results, and key factors, were not as expected.

The next major version of XFree86, the popular X11 windowing system for Unix, is now available from XFree86's FTP server and its mirrors. Version 4.3.0 offers many new features, including the RandR extension, new mouse cursors, better font engine, better ATi Radeon support and much more.