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."

The GCC Project has just updated its front page with the addition of two significant announcements: support for precompiled headers (PCH) and a new C++ parser that has brought g++ near the top of the food chain in conformance and led to over 100 bugs being closed.

Lycoris interview with Jason Spisak the Marketing Director, at Lycoris. Lycoris provides operating systems such as Desktop LX and Productivity suites for office use. "We provide an alternative to Microsoft's core products at a much greater value."

KAMiKAZOW writes "It's now possible to boot ReactOS from CD and to compile ReactOS under itself. There will be also a new release before the end of this month." Unlike many of the small, independent Linux distros and other OSes, ReactOS has a clearcut, fairly unique goal - to run Windows binaries. Read more on their homepage.

Terminus wrote in to tell us that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 is now available on the FreeBSD FTP servers. He also reminds us "The final release is scheduled for January 17th 2003."

Cosmoe 0.6 has been released. The have added new Be APIs and the APIs are more similar to the Be APIs. The built-in FreeType library has been removed, and new fonts have been added. 0.6 does not include the DirectFB-based rewrite of the appserver, that is expected to be added in release 0.7. Visit the Cosmoe website for more details.

Microsoft Corp. won some and lost some on Friday in its efforts to get a federal judge to dismiss antitrust lawsuits filed by Sun Microsystems Inc., Be Inc. and Burst.com Inc. U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz denied Microsoft's motions in the Be and Burst.com case in a hearing this morning. But this afternoon, Motz granted requests to dismiss some of the counts raised by Sun, while taking others under review.

Infoworld is reporting that Handspring, who has been an exclusive Palm OS licensee, is interested in the RIM email software. The RIM Blackberry devices have proven very popular among business users, but the Blackberry units have limited PDA capabilities. Palm-based wireless messaging devices have been less popular. Presumably, Handspring is interested in producing a "best of both worlds" solution.

With QNX 6.2.1 there are many new features. One of them is a new multi-media system. Screenshots of one of the first apps to use this system can be found on QNXZone.

The folks at Linux Journal used a time machine to post an article from the future about Intel's compiler for Linux, and specifically about the optimizations they used to beat gcc on benchmarks. The increasing acceptance of Linux among developers and researchers has yet to be matched by a similar increase in the number of available development tools. The recently released Intel C++ and Fortran compilers for Linux aim to bridge this gap by providing application developers with highly optimizable compilers for the Intel IA-32 and Itanium processor families.

The first beta of Mandrake Linux 9.1 is downsized to only one CD. A complete list of packages on this CD is available here. BTW, OSNews would be happy to host your preview. Update: Screenshots.

"The Apple booth staff 'freaked' when I tried to plug my FWDepot Cutie FireWire test drive into the new 17" and 12" PowerBooks with Photoshop, Quake3, and other real world test apps. But I knew you wanted some idea of the performance, right? So since the demo units were connected to the 'Net, I downloaded Xbench beta and ran it on the two new PowerBooks... along with a few others." Take a look at the benchmarks over at Bare Feats.

"Macworld Expo in San Francisco is more than a technology convention. It is a personality litmus test, too. By contrast, Apple inspires rave reviews. And accounts for only 2.3% of the worldwide computer market, according to research firm IDC. The company blazes forth, but few answer the call." Read the editorial at C|Net.