"In the first two articles of this series (see "Real Time and Linux, Part 1" and "Real Time and Linux, Part 2: the Preemptible Kernel"), we examined the fundamental concepts of real time and efforts to make the Linux kernel more responsive. In this article we examine two approaches to real time that involve the introduction of a separate, small, real-time kernel between the hardware and Linux. We also return to benchmarking and compare a desktop/server Linux kernel to modified kernels." The article is hosted at LinuxDevices.com.

"It all boils down to these two extremes: RMS wants software freedom regardless of user satisfaction, and Miguel de Icaza wants user satisfaction regardless of whether the principles of the GPL are violated. Everyone else in the GNOME project is somewhere in between, spanning the gap." Read the report at NewsForge.

The first big news today from the WWDC 2002 is that Apple now officially stops the MacOS 9 development and goes full speed with OSX. Steve Jobs calls the next step "X only. It's time to drop OS 9," he said. "We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only." He cited Microsoft as an example of companies that are going X only. Apple expects to see 5 million MacOSX users by the end of the year. "These are the guys buying the application software," he said. "MacOS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for you . Today we say goodbye to MacOS 9 for all future development," said Jobs. Stay tuned for more news from WWDC. Update: "Quartz Extreme" will probably force most of the Mac users to upgrade. Read on. Update 2: Read on.

In this first part of a two-part series, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren't nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary -- and still in the process of refinement. The story begins with Apple's genesis in the 1970s and takes you through key events up through 1993, when NeXTSTEP began to flounder. In Part Two (Friday, May 10), Simson and Michael pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X. Update: Apple has released a "Kernel Programming" online book, which has a wide and diverse audience like the set of potential system software developers for MacOSX, including the following sorts of developers: device-driver writers, network-extension writers, file-system writers, developers of software that modifies file system data on-the-fly, system programmers familiar with BSD, Linux, and similar OSes, developers who want to learn about kernel programming.

As seen on BSDForums: "The FreeBSD-STABLE branch of the source tree has now been frozen in preparation for the release of FreeBSD 4.6. This means that any new commits to the -stable source tree must be approved by the release engineering team first. The expected ship date for 4.6 is June 1 2002."

"Although many people frequently belittle Palm OS 4 as being nothing new, it has introduced true disk-like expansion to the Palm platform en masse. Although not the first instance of expansion options for Palm OS, OS 4-based devices are now appearing in droves, ushering in a new wave of applications and possibilities. Of course, as with any major step forward, with all of these new options come new problems, incompatibilities, and confusion." Part I, Part II and Part III of the article at InfoSync.