"An upgrade to Sun's enterprise server clustering technology is set to arrive next week alongside the company's much-anticipated new Solaris 9 operating environment. Backwards-compatible to Solaris 8, Sun Cluster 3.0 will offer features such as improved ease of management, enhanced dynamic configuration, and support for Oracle9i RAC (Real Application Clusters), according to Jim Sangster, the group manager for Sun's cluster product line, in Palo Alto, Calif." Read the story at InfoWorld.

Wind River Systems, a maker of software that powers many of the lesser-known types of computing devices hidden in the fabric of the high-tech world, has won approval to have its operating system used in Formula One race cars. Read the report at ZDNews.

A lot of interesting hardware-related news lately. First of all, Matrox makes a dynamic come back with its Parhelia512 graphics card and a lot of sites (1, 2, 3, 4) carry the white papers and spec sheets. In the console world, SONY has slashed the prices of PSone ($49) and PS2 ($199), following price cuts by Microsoft on XBOX. However, PS2 remains the No1 console in sales, by far. In the meantime, Intel introduced faster Celerons, based on the Pentium4 core. In fact, these new Celerons are nothing but the older Pentium4 that were selling last year. The newer Pentium 4s have reached a speed of 2.53 Ghz. On the other side of the river, Apple announces a new rack-mount server:

Gentoo is so far, the big Linux surprise this year. With its 1.0 release took the Linux world by storm and converted a huge number of power users and developers from the well-known Linux distros they were using, to the lightweight Gentoo Linux. While its installation process is not for the faint of heart, it pays back the user with a highly optimized system. As a result, Gentoo is dubbed the "fastest Linux distro" to date. Read on for an exclusive interview with Gentoo's project leader, Daniel Robbins where he reveals that Gentoo will be further optimized with the fastest x86 C/C++ compiler (Intel's ICC) in addition to GCC 3.1. Daniel also speaks about the future plans for Portage and the overall system in general.

This is the first installment in ThinkSecret's series of news coverage for the next major update to Mac OS X, code-named Jaguar. They take a look at tweaks to OS X's Finder and System Preferences, as seen in the first developer preview of Jaguar, build 6C35, and include lots of screenshots.

Robert Szeleney emailed in to tell us about the new version of his PDF documentation for SkyOS: "This PDF File has a lot of information about SkyOS, it's design, applications and much more".

One and a half months ago, we were among the first to report about an operating system which would combine the strengths of Linux & AtheOS and that would breath a new kind of life back to BeOS. Today, we are happy to host an exclusive interview with the architect of the combined OS, Bill Hayden. Dubbed "Cosmoe", the OS not only will feature support for the AtheOS, Linux and BeOS APIs, but also for... Macintosh's Carbon! Read on for more surprises!

"Palm subsidiary PalmSource introduced a new program to help software developers create applications for its upcoming operating system. PalmSource is offering a kit that includes a Palm OS 5 simulator so developers can test their applications on the operating system. PalmSource is also introducing the Palm Powered Compatible Solution logo, which can be applied to applications that pass compliancy tests with Palm OS 4 and 5. The test will be administered by a third party and requires a fee. The fee and availability of the test will be announced early this summer with the launch of PalmOS 5. The logo is meant to help consumers identify software that meets compatibility standards." Story at ZDNews.

Apple is offering up to $300 off a purchase of Power Mac G4 in its "Powerful offer" through July 7th (just one week before the NY MacWorld). The promo offers $200 mail-in rebate on a 800MHz Power Mac, and $300 rebate on either a dual 1-GHz Power Mac or a 933MHz. The 933 Mhz specific model seems like a good deal overall (considerably faster than the 800 MHz one because of its additional 2 MB L3 cache), especially if you add some 1 GB memory on it that you can find for cheap these days ($50 USD for a 512 MB DIMM PC-133 SDRAM). The offer is only valid at retail Apple store or at the Apple Store online.

These are the first three parts of a multipart paper 'BSD vs. GPL': "The paper attempts to establish a framework for the social analysis that might help to clarify issues for developers of free/open source products as well as the relative merits of each license. This paper is written from the software developer point of view, not that of a lawyer. I would argue that such an approach makes sense because none of major open/free software licenses was ever tested in court. And as such they can be viewed as a social contract, a mechanism for attracting users and co-developers and ensuring cooperation."

On this Chinese website you can already see some pictures of Matrox' new graphics chip code-named "Parhelia" in action. An English translation of another russian source can be found here. Note this information was meant to be under NDA until the 14th of May. The pictures at this webpage show a three monitor display setup, demonstrating Quake3 Arena, a flight simulator and Adobe Photoshop. The text talks about a 20GB/s memory bandwidth, other sources indicate 19GB/s! An announcement by Matrox is expected on the 14th of May.

OSNews reader and OS developer Wim Cools writes: "I'm writing a hobby OS (TriangleOS) and I've just released the second version of it. The OS isn't very big yet, but I've managed to begin with a GUI and have applications running inside the windows. Anyway, here's my site. There are a few screenshots of the GUI in an early stage but I haven't been able to create any up to date screenshots yet, with the shell and applications running but there's a floppy image available for everyone to check it out."
Another interesting new OS is Sartoris. Santiago Bazerque is part of the Sartoris team and he writes: "Me and my friends from the Univeridad de Buenos Aires are working on an experimental microkernel. We are now finishing our second release. We are not OS gurus, just a few students (our Computer Organization professor looked at us in a quite funny way when we told her we wanted to build an operative system, but hey, we did it!). The webpage is here, in case you feel like taking a look."
Note: Before everyone starts again "what does that OS do and why do we need it?" please let me clarify that these hobby/small OSes are built with the purpose of gaining knowledge. They were never meant to create userbases or user communities or markets. They are solely of developer-only interest, users can try them, but they won't directly benefit.

Peter Chubb posted a patch to the lkml, with which he's now managed to mount a 15 terabyte file (using JFS and the loopback device). Without the patch, Peter explains, "Linux is limited to 2TB filesystems even on 64-bit systems, because there are various places where the block offset on disc are assigned to unsigned or int 32-bit variables." Peter works on the Gelato project in Australia. His efforts include cleaning up Linux's large filesystem support, removing 32-bit filesystem limitations. When I asked him about the new 64-bit filesystem limits, he offered a comprehensive answer and this interesting link. The full thread can be found here on KernelTrap. Reaching beyond terrabytes, beyond pentabytes, on into exabytes. I feel this sudden discontent with my meager 60 gigabyte hard drive...

Two SuSE 8.0 reviews blossom on the web. The first can be found at TheRegister, while the second one is courtesy of LinuxBeginner. LinuxBeginner also includes four screenshots of the YaST2 configuration tool, which substancially can help newbies configure their SuSE Linux with ease.