Not everyone's happy with the default look and feel of MacOSX. So the Unsanity LLC guys have come to fullfil feature requests from many MacOSX users. They have written applications that are basically "hacks" (Unsanity prefers the word "haxies"), that they change MacOSX, sometimes in a pretty fundamental way. We tested three of their products, Fruitmenu, WindowShadeX and Xounds.

This is the second Lindows/Wal-Mart review coming out in a short while, and this one, is truly a must read. The author is a journalist that have used Windows, but he is not a Unix user. Trying to test Lindows he got into similar trouble as David Coursey did two weeks ago, when he tried Red Hat Linux. While Mike Langberg of San Jose Mercury News used a supposedly "desktop-oriented" Linux distribution, Lindows, as opposed to the server-oriented and marketed Red Hat, he still found it very unfriendly for common tasks like changing the refresh rates of a monitor.

This is not exactly OS news, but they are definately interesting geek news. A lot of things have been said about Matrox Parhelia's inability to beat the GeForce4 Ti or the Radeon 8500 in pure FPS, however, also a lot have been said that the point of Parhelia is to offer some advanced 3D features and great rendering quality. This great quality and advanced features (like displacement mapping) can be seen in the first 12 screenshots of the Imperium Galactica III: Genesis web site. This game is the first to be released that it has been optimized for the Parhelia. Enjoy the view.

Less than two months since the release of Red Hat Linux 7.3, Red Hat already released a 5-CD beta of their upcoming version of Red Hat Linux, codenamed Limbo. The beta includes Gnome 2.0, KDE 3.0.1, GCC 3.1, Mozilla 1.0, OpenOffice 1.0 and much more.

"The widely anticipated update to Apple Computer's Mac OS X will appear earlier than expected, sources say, which is good news for the company in a tough year." Read the report at News.com.

"It was with great anticipation that I began looking at Wal-Mart's latest offering: a Microtel PC with LindowsOS preloaded. I had reviewed the OS-less Microtel computer from Wal-Mart a few weeks ago and I hoped that this, the first consumer-focused Linux-based PC to appear from a major U.S. retailer, would be a great product for Linux newbies. Unfortunately, no matter how much I try to like this system, I am not comfortable recommending it to novice users." Read the review at NewsForge.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0.2. KDE 3.0.2 primarily provides useability and stability enhancements over KDE 3.0.1, which shipped in late May 2002. The new KDE version also compiles with GCC 3.1, so it would be a great opportunity to build it manually for better perfomance (change the "i686" option with the kind of CPU you have).

OSNews receives a lot of visitors every day, and while we try to equally report on all operating systems, including the commercial ones, most of our readership remains focused on open source. We have put together two polls for you, one to vote for your favorite Linux distribution and one of for your favorite X11 window manager or desktop environment. Read more and vote!

"Recently Dennis E. Powell wrote a commentary entitled "The future belongs to GNOME; inertia, to KDE" that has generated much feedback, and a lot of flames in the KDE community. From my perspective as a software company that was/is doing KDE specific applications I think I see where the fundamental disconnect is between the two, and in my discussions with a number of the core developers, they have substantiated my opinion on this." Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.

"SGI is widely expected to make a statement of direction that will see the company push Itanium-based machines employing open source systems and middleware software along side its MIPS-based Origin servers and Onyx visualization systems (think of it as workstations created directly from slices of a parallel supercomputer and you'll get the right idea), which run the Irix variant of Unix." Read the story.

David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.

There's a new article on computer commentary site "The Idea Basket" detailing the features and importance of the Rendezvous networking protocol that will be shipping with next major release of Mac OS X. It should be a very interesting read for many computer users, as Rendezvous will profoundly affect the way people use their Macs as well as other computer systems in a networked setting.

"Apple dropped a bombshell on music makers today by acquiring Emagic which, with Steinberg, dominates the market for sequencing software. Apple said it will axe the Windows version of Emagic's Logic sequencer come September." Read the report at TheRegister.

This is just a reminder about some OSNews-related stuff. First off, by reading the survey results, we saw that a lot of people were complaining about the popup ads, while these have completely stopped as of 2 weeks ago. Also, other people complained that OSNews does not look good on Lynx. OSNews looks pretty good on Lynx and w3m and Links and even AvantGo, while we even have WAP support (check screenshot on the above link). But you will need to read here first how to have these services working for you. Also, we are always looking for people to write articles for OSNews. These days we generally serve more than 40,000 page views per day, so this could be a good way to have your voice heard on OS and other technology-related matters.