In the run up to the launch of PlayStation 2, Sony set out its ultimate vision for gaming technology. In a series of commercials run in the United States, the PlayStation 2 was hailed as a step in the evolution of the surgically implanted PlayStation 9 controller, tipped to hook up to the a transparent glassy globe which is the console through the retina.

The GNOME Project announced today the immediate availability of the GNOME 2.0.2 Desktop and Developer Platform! The GNOME 2.0.x Desktop and Developer Platform releases are devoted to bugfixes, translations, user interface consistency, and general polish of our major 2.0 release. In GNOME 2.0.2, you'll see the results of continued performance and stability work, plus plenty of bug fixes: 318 total GNOME2 bugs marked fixed since the last release (including fixes on other branches).

From SuSE Linux 8.1 on, YaST2 comes with a new, powerful package manager. It supersedes the classic YaST2 single package selection and integrates the YaST Online Update (YOU) and post-installation add-on selection at the same time. It lays the foundation for supporting multiple installation sources like a traditional set of SuSE CDs, add-on product CDs, patch CDs, FTP servers or even local directories - all of which may contain software packages to install. Specially optimized versions were implemented for both graphical user interface (the YaST2 Qt UI) or text interface (the YaST2 NCurses UI), providing each type of user with the tool that best fits his needs. Read more for the commentary.

"Apple's Switch campaign to woo Windows users to its own operating system OS X has been running in high gear lately. Apple also recently issued a major "dot-level" upgrade to OS X called Jaguar, in what some industry followers consider to be a catch-up move to many of the features found in Windows XP. If you ask me, OS X could stand a better chance of challenging Windows on the desktop than Linux does, or ever did." Read the editorial at TechUpdate.

NetBSD 1.6 has been released, with binary releases for 39 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6 release announcement and in the following blurb.

From Deadly.org: "Yep, bagged and tagged, 3.2 is in beta. Snapshots are up, and you can keep up to date on -current via CVS. Give it a whirl, please test it and make 3.2 a solid release. I'm running it on a couple of systems and find it to be pretty stable, so far."

AROS, the AmigaOS clone which is being developed by Amiga enthousiasts, and who many regard it as the real future of the AmigaOS, now includes a simple WorkBench clone. Screenshots are available.

These switch ads on TV and web seem to be a huge success and PR for Apple. Today, we interview Jeremiah Cohick, one of the Mac switchers whose ad first aired just last week. Dive in for more!

The OSNews team needs to rid itself of a snazzy Sony Superslim Vaio Z505HS. It's happily running Red Hat Linux 7.2, and to sell it on eBay would mean going to the trouble of installing Windows on it again. (perhaps only to have someone buy it and want to install Linux). Instead, we've decided to see if any OSNews reader wants it. Best offer over $700 gets it. Read more for specs.

CRUX is a lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. The highlight in this release is the transition to GCC 3.2. Further this release includes Linux 2.4.19, XFree86 4.2.1, OpenSSH 3.4, Sendmail 8.12.6, Perl 5.8, pkgutils 5.0, WindowMaker (no Gnome or KDE) etc. See the change log and go to CRUX's download section to download the ISO image (180 MB).

"'Yukon,' the code-name for a major overhaul of SQL Server, will be ready for general availability sometime during the 2004 fiscal year, and "Longhorn," the code-name for the Windows operating system release after Windows .NET Server 2003, is coming in 2005, according to a senior Microsoft official. As part of Longhorn, Allchin said customers can expect to see new features for intelligent auto configuration, such as BIOSes and firmware that can be 'automatically updated in a seamless way.' Also, Allchin said Longhorn will include new functionality for server resiliency, such as self-healing characteristics, a more componentized architecture, and additional monitoring services with filters that can 'dynamically' flow out to servers." Read the report at ENTnews.

"They are a very serious competitor. Their community is very, very good, and we're hard at work trying to follow that model. Obviously...the way (Linux) work is done--I think about it in a more componentized way. I believe in integration because I believe it makes peoples' lives simpler. On the other hand, I consider componentization to be a great attribute from an engineering perspective. Then there are things I don't want to learn from them. It's very hard to innovate when you're in a decentralized mode. Look at the Linux kernel. Do you think there's a lot of innovation there? It's not that they're not great developers--they are. I have great respect for them, but I think it's hard, because of the model, to do. They can do innovation--great innovation--in small pockets. There's quite a dichotomy there and there are some advantages. But in terms of some of the innovations for the future, I don't want to adopt that model." Read Jim Allchin's interesting interview at C|Net News.com.

SuSE 8.1 is expected to be released on September 25. The Personal and Professional versions (priced at 50 and 80 Euros respectively) are already available for pre-ordering. The new version includes kernel 2.4.19, KDE 3.0.3, GCC 3.2, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1, YaST and YaST's Online Updater, Wireless Lan, USB2 and Firewire support.

XFS is a GPL'd high-performance journaling file system developed by SGI since 1994 for the IRIX operating system. Version 1.0 was released for Linux on May 2001, with the current release being version 1.1. Christoph Hellwig has provided patches aimed towards getting XFS included into the 2.5 development kernel. Read more on KernelTrap.