What would you say if there was a way to support your favorite OS or X11 Desktop Environment by agreeing to use an ad-sponsored version? The ad would show *only once*, during the load of the OS or graphics desktop environment, something like a splash screen, and then it would go away after 5 or 10 seconds or if you manually close its window or after you have clicked to the actual ad. This way, you could be helping financially open source projects, like Gnome, KDE, FreeBSD, Gentoo and others.

"Palm Inc was considering Linux as the foundation of the next-generation PalmOS as recently as last spring, sources tell us. Palm eventually acquired Be Inc's development team last August, but internal discussions on the viability of a Linux-based handheld OS were taking place as recently as fifteen months ago. These were squashed by the lawyers, who concluded that Palm couldn't reconcile the GPL with the in house view of intellectual property. Palm is not using the cut-down embedded version BeOS, BeIA, which was targetted at the NatSemi x86 system on a chip, but a ground-up OS for ARM." Read the report at TheRegister.

Standards mean little to developers looking for the biggest audience online: Internet Explorer users.
Our Take: OSNews serves more pages to Internet Explorer users than to all the rest, however, being faithful to the multi-platform nature of OSNews, our site is hand-coded and compatible with all mainstream browsers. We include support for WAP and Unix text-mode browsers, AvantGO and other, older (and sometimes... obscure), browsers. More info, in our recent discussion here.

From DaemonNews.org: FreeBSD 4.6.1 is scheduled for release July 17, 2002 in order to update SSH, BIND, incorporate a partial ATA fix, and other changes from the RELENG_4_6 release branch. On a side note, FreeBSD 5.0 developer preview 2, a full release for the i386, Alpha, and sparc64 architectures is scheduled for release July 25.

Following widespread skepticism of Microsoft's motives for developing its trusted computing platform, the software giant this week moved to reassure the software community that Palladium will not be limited to Microsoft's platforms. Read the report at ZDNews.

Cheap hardware, free trips to the United States and all the popcorn you can eat--life's a junket if you're a computer programmer in India. Read the report at ZDNews.

Cygwin/XFree86 is a port of XFree86 to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It runs on all recent consumer and business versions of Windows and is now installed via Cygwin's setup.exe install. In the meantime, Garnome now is able to build both GNOME 2.0.0 and KDE 3.0.2. Garnome is a tool which automates the process of building GNOME 2 and KDE 3. It keeps track of all the dependencies and standard configuration work. Make sure you export some GCC optimization flags as described here before starting building the software though.

Microsoft posted updates the Internet Explorer for Mac. Two separate downloads are available from Microsoft's Web site, one for the Classic Mac OS and one specifically for Mac OS X. IE 5.2.1 provides all the latest security and performance enhancements for IE 5 for Mac OS X, according to information posted on Microsoft's Web site. IE 5.1.5 for Mac OS 8.1 to 9.x provides enhanced support for HTTP and resolves all security vulnerabilities in previous versions of IE 5.

New version, two new screenshots and also an implementation of a TCP/IP stack this month holds for MenuetOS. In the meantime, the SkyOS project also gets along and it now features a printing kit along with other feature additions and improvements.

"Microsoft will support eight-node failover clusters in Windows .NET Enterprise Server. The decision came months after the Beta 3 release of the Windows .NET Server family editions back in November, when Microsoft announced that only four-node clusters would be supported in Windows .NET Enterprise Server, while eight-node failover clusters would be reserved for Windows .NET Datacenter Server customers." Read the report at ENT-News.

"Sometimes you need to open your heart and let the love flow, even toward those you do not naturally like. Indeed, many religions claim this is a great way to achieve satori or sainthood or whatever state they consider to be the highest one a living being can achieve. So, what with wIndependence Day now being behind us, I think it is time for us to think kind thoughts about Microsoft and Microsoft employees. Their best times are behind them. They have nowhere to go but down. They have every right to be upset about this. And Linux users should be there to comfort them in their hour of need." Editorial from OSDN's editor in chief.

The concept behind rxLinux, is to centralise configuration and management of multiple GNU/Linux servers. New servers can be deployed in minutes. A web interface is used to build custom iso cdrom dedicated for specific servers. Server, also called rxnodes, boot up from that cdrom and get the rest of configuration and software from a master server. No administration is done directly on nodes. Everything is controlled from the master servers. rxLinux is based on the GNU/Linux system and related Free tools, ensuring your Freedom as a user and an admin.

From Daemonnews: Jason Thorpe has committed some socket code to the NetBSD-current source tree, and bumped the OS revision to 1.6C. For some apps, this can be a major performance improvement.

"There are subtle lessons about freedom in the GPL, but you'll never find them by just reading the license. Instead, you'll have to read between the lines (so to speak) and try to see what can't be seen. Furthermore, these lessons, despite being deceptively simple, could have a profound impact on human freedom if only people understood them. In a sense, software freedom can be seen as a metaphor for human freedom." Read the editorial at Advogato. Update: Checking out my email this morning, I found a submission about another new article on Free Software.