Microsoft on Tuesday released blueprints designed to help technology managers install Windows more efficiently and at a lower cost. The software titan issued five guides that businesses can use for a variety of tasks, including patch management or installing new desktop applications companywide. The Redmond, Wash.-based company calls the suite of guides Microsoft Solutions for Management.

"It's not quite open source, but the makers of the embedded operating system LynxOS have taken a step towards bringing code availablity to their customers. That was the word out of California yesterday afternoon when LynuxWorks announced a new set of pricing packages designed to make LynxOS a more affordable option for those who are considering using the real-time operating system (RTOS) for their embedded projects" Read the full article at All Linux Devices.

SmoothWall 1.0 has been released and LinuxOrbit has a related article. On another distro release, for BeOS this time, Developer Edition v1.1 is out. It includes many new drivers and system improvements.

TriangleOS is a 32-bit Operating System for the x86 platform, written in C and Assembler. Wim Cools posted some screenshots of his OS. On his site, information and images can be found of the latest kernel version which can be booted from floppy.

Genesi just did the official launch of MorphOS & Pegasos at the Amiga and Retro show in Aachen, Germany at the weekend and won the Amiga Award 2002 by popular vote. The company got their first 50 production boards and these have been sent out already. This is the first new desktop system/platform launched since Be launched the BeBox 7 years ago (HW & Software - there are plenty of new OSs and hardware but entirely new platforms are pretty rare these days). The companies (Thendic-france and bplan) are merging into a new company called Genesi.

"Winning respect is now the least of the open-source movement's concerns. Future struggles may involve political and political challenges in copyright law or digital rights management or intellectual property issues, according to Tiemann, nowadays chief technology officer at Linux seller Red Hat." Read the interview at C|Net.

In Qt 3.1.1 the build issues with the Professional Edition have been solved. The build problems reported on Solaris and HP-UX have been addressed. Detection of Xft2 support has been added. The installer and reconfigure tools on Windows have been fixed. Apply changes to build with Borland Kylix/Linux. Look'n'Feel improvements in the Qt/Mac version.

"The vision of running Linux on corporate desktops has gained ground during the past 18 months, as full- featured office productivity software has become a reality and improvements have been made to the Linux kernel and to installation and administration tools. But even though the open-source operating system has moved closer to filling desktop needs, nagging gaps remain, said users and analysts at last week's Enterprise Linux Forum Conference & Expo here. In some cases, they added, the lingering lack of needed functionality is making it hard for IT managers to switch their users to Linux." Read the article at PCWorld.

There are certain perennial debates amongst the technical community, constantly revisited with differing outcomes for each person. Linux vs. Windows, KDE vs. Gnome, Mac vs. PC - they are unwinnable arguments, and although the outcome varies overtime with each successive release or new piece of hardware, they consistently gain our attention. When presented with the opportunity to borrow a Macintosh for a little over a month, I jumped at the chance to resolve one of these debates for myself. The question was: Can the Mac replace my PC?

"The upstart Linux operating system isn't an upstart any more, according to Linux executives meeting in Boston last week. The Enterprise Linux Forum brought together vendors and users of Linux systems at a time when the operating system seems to have established itself as a major force in corporate computing - to the chagrin of established giants like Microsoft Corp." Read the article at Boston Globe.

Rational Software Corp is joining Big Blue's stable of industry leaders-turned-business units after IBM announced its $2.1bn acquisition of the application modeling and design specialist. The news is a blow to Microsoft Corp, which on Friday conceded executives had "talked internally" about an acquisition of Rational. Rational's XDE software modeling tool, launched in February, sat inside Microsoft' Visual Studio.NET integrated development environment (IDE) in addition to IBM's WebSphere. Read the article at ComputerWire.

The compiler suite coming for all SGI MIPS-based machines is one of the best optimized development tools for any platform. SGI has put many years of experience on the newest version of the series, MIPSpro 7.4, which we recently gave it a spin.

Acheron writes: "Spotted this on Deadly.org today. Four University of Waterloo students are working on adding SMP support to the OpenBSD kernel as their 4th year Computer Engineering Design Project. Their website can be found at Spinlocks.org. Best of luck to them."

Drobe reviews the Iyonix, the machine based on the Intel X-Scale CPU that will run on RiscOS 5.