MandrakeSoft is looking at a Chapter 11-style bankruptcy, to solve its financial difficulties, according to a leaked email from one of its executives. New MandrakeSoft CEO Francois Bancilhon says the liabilities total about €2 million, but that he's weighing all possible choices for resolving the problems. The leaked email, however, paints a different picture. It describes specific plans to go with either Chapter 11 or its French equivalent. TheRegister has the story and NewsForge as well.

One of the coolest 3D OpenGL games written for the Mac 8.x/9.x, WaterRace, is now GPL and it would be great if developers would port it to other platforms that support GL.

SCO Group, the struggling company that holds the copyright to the Unix operating system, plans to boost its revenue by charging fees to some customers that have moved from its products to Linux.

My husband and I made it back from Europe just last night (after an adventurous trip back) so today I was finally having access to my G4 Cube in order to test Safari, the new Apple browser based on KHTML. I like what I saw on Safari. The browser is simple (I like simplicity) and indeed loads the web pages fast (even faster than Gecko browsers on my PC) by using some techniques on rendering the page almost immediately after receiving the data from the web. With Safari, MacOSX has now seven "native" graphical browsers. Read more and vote for your favorite OSX browser! Update: A relevant article is posted on News.com regarding the reasons Apple chose KHTML and not Gecko.

The Intel Xeon processor introduces a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT) that makes a single processor behave like two logical processors. The technology allows the processor to execute multiple threads simultaneously, which can yield significant performance improvement. But, exactly how much improvement can you expect to see? This article gives the results the investigation into the effects of Hyper-Threading (HT) on the Linux SMP kernel. It compares the performance of a Linux SMP kernel that was aware of Hyper-Threading to one that was not.

Amiga Inc has revealed more details on the new Amiga Operating System: "Amiga is pleased to publish this first version of the feature set of the up and coming AmigaOS4.0. The document will undergo revision in subsequent issues but because of the massive demand for information made by the public, we have decided to release it in its current state." The official launch of the PPC based AmigaOne platform together with AmigaOS4.0 is sheduled for March at the upcoming CeBit tradeshow in Germany.

Bernd from YellowTab sent us a number of screenshots of their upcoming Zeta operating system which is based on BeOS R5 and Dano versions. First screenshot, second. And here are a shot of ToDoIt application for Zeta (still under heavy development), which is a personal organizer and more.

"As some Apple defenders have noted (and I implied with my Bang & Olufsen comparison), there are lots of niche players who make loads of money selling higher priced, but high quality products. The problem, however, is that software lacks the natural levels of compatibility found in other markets. Bang & Olufsen stereos can play the same radio stations and CDs as the lower-priced offerings from Aiwa. That isn't the case with operating systems, and really can't be so long as developers have different ideas about API design." Read the editorial at ZDNews.

From the announcement: "The Mono team is proud to release Mono 0.18, with plenty of bug fixes and improvements. If you are a happy 0.17 user, this release is a happiness extension release. Many bugs in the runtime, class libraries and C# compiler have been fixed." Additionally, Qt# (a C# language binding for the Qt toolkit) 0.6 was released too.

The next update to Microsoft's Windows CE .Net OS, which has been given the code name McKendric, will ship before the middle of 2003 and include several new features, a company executive said at the Microsoft Embedded DevCon 2003 conference.

Bruno G. Albuquerque was the first to submit the big news on OpenBeOS. According to the OpenBeOS website, "With the latest round of changes made to the runtime linker, the startup code, and libroot.so, we are now finally able to load and run native BeOS applications. Of course, only simple one will work right now (since we only have (most of the) parts of libroot.so implemented), but I was able to run the same application under BeOS and OpenBeOS simultaneously. We can now make our first tests to prove binary and functional compatibility between both operating systems."

Carlos Perez has posted 25 reasons why he thinks Java is a better platform than .NET while Jason Whittington has an opposite article counteracting Carlos' arguments.

Is the modern operating system a tool of facilitation that should provide just the basic necessities of a system and no more, staying out of the way of the user? Or should the modern OS assist the user in their everyday tasks, sorting and displaying relevant information, providing a filter between the ever increasing amount of information and the task at hand.

From the GNOME Desktop 2.2 Release Candidate 1 (2.1.90): "1.21 Jigawatts", is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors."