"In May or June next year Sun will ship desktop computers running Linux, the open source Mozilla web browser, email program Evolution and Sun's StarOffice application suite. The desktops, being created under "Project Mad Hatter", will also ship with the open source WINE emulator program, allowing them to run Windows applications, and Samba, providing access to networked file and print services." Read the article at ComputerWorld. On Tuesday, OSNews will publish an exclusive article with more information on Solaris, Linux and Sun's plans for the desktop. Stay tuned for more.

"Having spent more than $1.2 trillion on information technology in the United States alone from 1995 to 2000, companies now want to wring the elusive productivity and bottom-line gains from this massive outlay. If buyers are glad to end their spendthrift ways, IT providers of course have a different perspective: After years of heady sales growth, they are now engaged in bare-knuckle competition as the industry confronts sated customers and overcapacity." Read the article at C|Net News.

My good friend Thijs Stalenhoef (from the BeOS/BeNews days) sent me a link to the NooFace web site, which is "in search of the Post-PC Interface". There are a lot of interesting articles to find there, so make sure you have a look at their archives as well.

Lycoris Build 62 Beta was released. Joseph Cheek, main developer at Lycoris, wrote a quick changelog: "Kernel printk fix; Mozilla form submit bug fix; Mozilla .rpm mime type fix; new gimp-print, cups 1.1.15; added chown/chmod for give/takeconsole; added newer Gatos ATi drivers; upgraded Autoconf to 2.54 and Automake to 1.5; added Gui devtools install". Report bugs here.

"Linux will be deployed on no more than five percent of desktops over the next two to three years because of a lack of viable applications, claimed Gartner research director Phil Sargeant on Thursday evening at the Gartner Symposium and ITXpo." Read the article about the Gartner Group's analysis.

In a reply on Linux kernel maling list to Aaron Lehmann's praising of the contest results of the latest 2.5-mm kernel Andrew Morton explains some of the important performance and design differences between the 2.4 stable series and the 2.5 development series accompanied by illustrating benchmarks. Read the report at KernelTrap.

"The journaling operation itself does impose a performance penalty on disk writes. Mac OS X Server alters the sizes of certain buffers used for file transactions when journaling is enabled, which mitigates much of the performance hit, reducing it from the 10-15 percent range down to the 2-5 percent range, for a system with 512MB of RAM. The more RAM you have, the more buffering can be used, so your performance hit decreases accordingly. This buffering does not occur on "regular" OS X, which is one reason why Apple is not supporting or recommending its use on non-OS X Server systems." Read the article at WorkingMac.

"It used to be that Unix was for the geeks, while the rest of the world used less command-intensive, and usually less powerful, operating systems such as Windows or the Mac OS. Even with the advent of native GUIs such as the X11 system, Unix was not for the uninitiated." Read the article at OnLamp.

Linux seller Red Hat--which chiefly looks to displace Unix rivals--announced today it has landed a customer that is bumping aside Microsoft Windows in favor of Red Hat software for its database servers. Read the report at News.com.

Lycoris and Ericom Software team up to release Desktop/LX InterConnect, a simple corporate desktop with full office suite and host connectivity tools. Desktop/LX InterConnect features Ericom Software's native Linux PowerTerm InterConnect software, the Lycoris ProductivityPak office suite, and the Lycoris Remote Desktop Client.

"On the contrary, I would argue that Open Source and JBoss in particular are already Sun's best defense against Microsoft .NET. Only Open Source has proven uniquely resilient to a Microsoft onslaught. In the same way that Linux has prevented MS NT from dominating the server operating system, JBoss will prevent .NET from making serious inroads into the application server tier, the crucial gateway to enterprise software applications." Read the article at Jboss.org.

This time, DigitalVideoEditing is comparing the fastest (and cheaper) P4 released today, at 3.06 GHz, versus the fastest currently available Mac at 2x1.25 GHz. Has everyone noticed that Apple stoped using extensively the slogan "Mhz don't matter" for months now?

"Why isn't GNU/Linux taking the desktop market by storm? After all, when you make a feature comparison, Linux has a lot going for it. With Windows, the operating system is just a start; you must add applications to make it functional. Many Linux distributions provide a desktop look similar to Windows and include an extensive assortment of applications, programming tools and games. Installing Windows and sundry applications can take most of a day. Contrast that with Linux, where the process typically takes less than 60 minutes." Read the article at News.com.

Apple has released a SDK for Sherlock 3, the company's Web Services tool. "Everything required to develop a channel is provided in the Sherlock 3 Channel SDK. The SDK includes technical documentation, a sample channel, a Project Builder template, and an Interface Builder Sherlock palette," according to Apple. In the meantime, Watson 1.6 was released and includes integration with the EyeTV DVR, iCal, and the MacOSX Address Book. On other important for the Mac platform releases, WebObjects 5.2 and BBEdit 7.0 was released. Get more OSX software from VersionTracker.