We spoke with Bill Moffitt, Product Line Manager for Solaris at Sun Microsystems. The second update to Solaris, called Solaris 9 12/02, was released this month. (Sun puts the month and year of the release date after the version number. Apparently, it was "released" in December, but don't ask why it was only made available a few days ago). In addition to bug fixes and updates that you would expect in a release like this, Sun has included a couple of big extras for capability and performance.

Mono 0.19 is released. Release notes, screenshots. GTK# 0.7 is also released.

In the first part of this series, Andrew D. Balsa looked at Mandrake Linux 9.1 and its initial beta release. Despite quite a few critical bugs, he was impressed with the progress and most charmed by the new KDE 3.1. When Mandrake released the second beta, he rushed to do another installation and these are his experiences, together with some impressive new screenshots.

An article in Baseline covers the increasing reliance that everyday appliances have on complex software, and the potentially disastrous results when that software fails. One prominent example of this is the BMW 745i, which has a sort of uber-control joystick that controls a WindowsCE-based system. This system was so buggy that BMW has done two recalls. The software was too ambitious and too poorly tested, so things like the brake lights not working and the units suddenly changing to metric are the result.

Earlier this week, Apple seeded pre-release versions of the v10.2.4 update to Mac OS X, both client and server. Both seeds of 10.2.4, known internally as "Jaguar Pink," were numbered build 6I13. Apple also has been writing drivers for a number of popular sound and video cards. With the release of 10.2.3, support was added for SoundBlaster Extigy, and as of last month, work was nearly complete on Audigy and Audigy 2 drivers. As for video cards, Apple is planning to support several workstation-quality graphics cards in 10.3, that weren't previously supported, including full support for NVidia Quadro 980, 900, and 750XGL. Support will also be added for ATI's top-end Fire GL series.

A ZDNet article covering the opening of the Linux World trade show also has a thorough "state of Linux business" overview. Some highlights: Big firms like HP, IBM, and Microsoft(!) will have a big presence; it seems like Linux willl continue its rapid rise in adoption, though it will still be difficult for firms to make the huge profits that companies like Microsoft have made because Linux resists lock-in; enterprise software vendors like BEA will continue to support Linux; and hardware vendors are embracing it more.

"Linux distributions have a wide variety of features that can make choosing the right one for your needs a daunting task. The larger distribution companies try to be the "one size fits all" solution while the less known distribution projects and companies tend to focus on their advantage over the big guys. In this article, we hope to give you a road map for your Linux distribution decisions by showing you some common and unique traits among Linux distributions." On other Linux news, Tux Reports has published an At-A-Glance look at the ALT Linux Master 2.2 beta (note: TuxReport's Birdie is 11 years old and has used Linux for 3 years. She has installed dozens of Linux distributions!).

Late last night Red Hat made available on its ftp web site a new beta of its upcoming Red Hat Linux 8.1 distribution, codenamed Phoebe 8.0.93 (they used the same codename as in the first beta a month ago (8.0.92)). ISOs here, documentation, release notes.

Node monitoring is that most BeOS-esque of system services that allows applications to offload the task of watching files and directories for changes. It provides the basis of "live" queries and folders, etc. Axel Dörfler (author of OpenBFS) has checked in a first version document for describing the kernel implementation of node monitoring for OpenBeOS.

A note from Subband Software, former developer of MacAmp, cropped up recently: "Thanks to everyone who supported us over the years. iTunes just got to be far too big, far too free, and far too bundled with the OS." The editorial is going on giving more examples how Apple is taking away market from the small developers by embedding such user software on OSX (e.g. iPhoto, iMovie etc). In the past we talked about it regarding the Watson application and its competition with Sherlock 3. Update: One of the two developers (the most commited one) of Chimera is thinking of dropping out: "I'm torn about what to do with Chimera. It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn't any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much." In the meantime, Safari tops 1 million downloads.

Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers.

The GNU-Darwin project is now considered stable and it has reached 1.0 status (it seems that the latest beta will be marked as 1.0). Download from here, packages, ports.

"I've been thinking about this at great length for the past year or so. The W.I.M.P. interface is going to be with us for a while no matter what we think of it. It will evolve and get enhanced by other developments in input devices (eye tracking, speech recognition, humanoid virtual androids, etc..), but will probably largely remain the same. The real "innovations" (for lack of a less used word) are to be had in new approaches to using the computer to actually get work done." The editorial can be found at the interesting NooFace web site.

The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.