In an open letter to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, a group of users has called for the company to make Solaris 9 available on the lion's share of computers based on the Intel architecture. The letter, published as an ad in the San Jose Mercury News and titled "Shame on you, Scott", is the latest move in an eight-month war of words between Sun and a vocal contingent of its users. The spat kicked off in January when the software maker said it would put its next operating system, Solaris 9, on indefinite hold for the x86 architecture. Read more at News.com.

Looking to get a piece of the growing market for mobile services in China, a Chinese Linux developer has released an open-source alternative to smart-phone software from Microsoft and Symbian. China MobileSoft Ltd. (CMS) built its mLinux for Smart Phones software around its mLinux kernel, which is derived from a Linux kernel developed by Red Hat Inc., said Liu Bing, business manager at CMS at the CeBIT Asia show on Monday. The mLinux kernel requires 200K bytes of memory and can be used in 3G (third-generation) mobile handsets, he said.

The OpenBFS team today announced that they finally moved to beta stage. This means that OpenBFS (the free and open source alternative, but fully compatible BeOS File System clone) is completely done feature-wise and only testing is missing now. OSNews (over)heard that "the query engine is way faster than the BFS one _and_ it supports searching on non-indexed attributes. Also it performs at least as good as BFS and in some test cases it is even considerably faster than it.".

Monday morning, Microsoft announced the completion of Windows XP Media Center Edition, which will power new media center PCs from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Samsung beginning next month. XP Media Center is the latest Windows version, and one of several products which rely on XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was finalized last week.

So what exactly are Sun's plans? While precise details remain close to Sun's chest, it is clear that the company is planning to assemble a suite of both open source and proprietary software products with which to go head to head with Microsoft. Some of these, such as the MySQL open source database, Sendmail messaging software, Samba file and print software, Apache web server, Mozilla browser, and Gnome desktop, have already been discussed by Sun executives. Our Take: At LinuxWorld, I saw their default configuration of Gnome 2 on Solaris. It looked pretty bad, while their X server did not even support AA. I don't think they are going anywhere to "assault" Microsoft. They might "assault" some other Unix or even Linux vendors, but their game will stop there.

In Parts I and II of this series, LinuxGazette examined the process of using tools available with Linux to build a simple boot sector and access the system BIOS. The toy OS will be closely modelled after the Linux kernel - and it will be switching to protected mode soon! This part III shows how it can be done.

From BSDForums: The FreeBSD-STABLE branch (development branch for 4-STABLE) of the source tree has now been frozen in preparation for the release of FreeBSD 4.7. This means that any new commits to the -stable source tree must be approved by the Release Engineering Team first. The expected "ship" date for FreeBSD 4.7 is October 1, 2002.

Despite the introduction of a heap of HP Unix servers tomorrow using the PA-RISC processor, the firm's long term push is for the Itanium platform. HP, you'll remember, seemed to get better results with the McKinley platform than its competitors at launch, and a document we've seen spells out its position both on compilers and on the binary compatibility of HP/UX, Linux and the Windows operating system.

eWeek and ThinkSecret claim that Apple (since the begining of OSX) is developing in parallel to the PPC version of MacOSX, an x86 version called 'Marklar' as a fallback option, in case the Motorola CPUs could not deliver. The article also claims that this version is assigned only to a few dozen engineers so far, for maintanance purposes-only, and Apple most probably would switch to the desktop Power4 CPU that IBM is preparing instead. We recently wrote an editorial about the probable switch of Apple to x86.

AnandTech has reviewed ATI's latest mobile graphics solution. According to the reviewer this small and energy efficient chip is the new king when it comes to mobile graphic chips for notebooks. Also John Carmack is apparently very positive about the chip and also stated that Doom 3 will be able to run smoothly with this new Radeon chip.

From our friends at DistroWatch: Your last chance to test things out and report bugs -- if you miss it, you have no right to complain that some things don't work in Mandrake 9.0! Links to the three ISO images: CD 1 (695MB), CD 2 (700MB), CD 3 (549MB) or try a more convenient mirror. Report bugs on the cooker mailing list. Also don't forget this excellent offer to all beta testers: Mandrake 9.0 DVD (as soon as it's available) + Mandrake cap for US$55! Great value compared to regular pricing -- click here if you'd like to take advantage of the offer coupled with free shipping within EU, USA and Canada and 50% off shipping cost for the rest of the world. Things just don't get much better that this, do they? Mandrake Linux 9.0 final should be out in about two-week's time.

Now that our kernel is able to distinguish the difference between IRIX binaries and other programs, we need to arrange the program environment so that the IRIX binary is able to start up (read Part 1 first).

DesktopLinux contributing editor Malcolm Dean interviews SCO's new CEO Darl McBride in-depth about Linux, the desktop, and the company's new direction.

Firms with valid Microsoft site licences cannot legally install Windows on PCs bought without the operating system, Microsoft has warned. Many companies with volume licences routinely apply a disk image over pre-installed software to achieve a standard configuration. But firms that try to cut costs by purchasing "naked" PCs, sold without an operating system, cannot legally install a Windows image because site licences only permit upgrading from a pre-installed version of Windows. Rob Enderle of analyst firm Giga Information Group warned companies not to ignore the small print. "By contract, have to report any customer that requests naked PCs and it often triggers a software audit by Microsoft. We've seen seven-figure bills go to those that were caught." Read the story at VNUnet.