A PC World article reports (thinly) on the Sergey Brin speech at LinuxWorld. Google certainly stands as one of the most high profile and impressive implementations of Linux on a massive scale. The Google co-founder attributes some of Google's success at building a cost-effective platform to the Linux OS.

In a move that could have repurcussions in the alternative OS world, Microsoft has pulled the free web fonts (Verdana, Courier New, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS etc.) that were downloadable from its site for some time. This is significant since several Linux distributions provide automatic installers for these fonts to improve the default fonts. Also, these fonts are essential for a bettet web browsing. Hopefully, distributors will now spend some money to design a good standard set of free fonts of their own.

According to an EWeek article, the The Free Standards Group will announce today that Caldera, Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE are Linux Standard Base certified. The LSB Certification program was launched at LinuxWorld in New York in late January.

"The new DELL desktops appear to be a slick interpretation of Microsoft's new licensing terms and a way to navigate customer demand for PCs without an OS installed. The Microsoft licensing terms, which were put in place on Aug. 1, specify that PC makers must ship PCs with an operating system. The new policy exists to prevent piracy and to better track OS shipments. With the n-Series, Dell will include a copy of a free operating system--FreeDOS--inside the cardboard box. However, the OS will not be pre-installed." FreeDOS is included just to give the ability to actually use the PC in case the user have no other OSes handy to install at a given time. Read the report at News.com.

So, you want to write an operating system. We discussed earlier a generic set of considerations that are important, from my experience, for this type of adventure. We proceed to look at solutions to the problem of actually getting started with writing your system: how to do it when you know you don't know what you're doing, making it work before making it work fast, and what to do when things go wrong.

Apple Computer on Tuesday unveiled souped-up Power Macs, in the first major upgrade to the professional system in about a year and half. The low-end model retains the 133Mhz bus, while on the mid- and high-end models it's cranked up to 167Mhz; the high-end model boasts 2MB of L3 cache. The creaking ATA-66 IDE controller is retained, but all models also have an additional ATA-100 bus. The Apple store lists the 2x867Mhz model (256MB RAM/60GB HD/DVD-CDRW) at $1,699; the 2x1Ghz model 256/80/Superdrive) at $2,499 - and both available for delivery right away. Read the reports at C|Net News.com and TheRegister. You can check the new Macs here or order them.

You can call Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don't call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft's enormously successful desktop business -- the jewel of which is Office XP -- into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. Read the interview at InfoWorld.

Exactly a whole year passed since we re-launched OSNews last August. This was our first story in the newly redesigned site back then. The old site is also available for browsing, while this was the first version of our redesign. Although OSNews is live since 1997, the site was not updated for many months, until we took over. Immediately after the redesign last August, we were serving around 700 pages per day, but today, we average around 51,000 web pages per day, and it seems that the only way is up! Today, OSNews is among the (pretty) big tech news sites on the web, but we could not have made it without you. So, a big thank you from the OSNews crew to all of you!

According to IDC, the Linux installed base, currently at 3.5 million units, will climb to 8.6 million server units alone by 2005. By contrast, Unix will drop from 2.61 million units to 2.53 million units. But Windows will still lead the way with an installed base of 8.6 million units in 2002 and 13.84 million server units in 2005. How far Linux climbs in the OS market remains to be seen. "In five to 10 years, Unix will be overtaken by it. Whether we will get by Windows, we'll get close," deVisser said. Read the report at InfoWorld. As for the LinuxWorld, ZDNews has an interesting all-around article.

FreeBSD has long been known for stability, security, and good performance, as well as for its strong developer community. But this open-source operating system has been dogged during the past few years by its inability to draw on the wealth of commercial and open-source applications available for Linux. Read the preview at InfoWorld.

Prologue by the editor-in-chief: "A bit more than two years ago, while I was still serving at BeNews, I asked Jeremy Friesner to write an article and present his cross-platform client-server messaging system for dynamic distributed applications, MUSCLE. Two weeks later, he came back to me with a multi-page article, explaining MUSCLE. To demonstrate the power of MUSCLE, Jeremy created a demo application based on it. The result was BeShare.

Sun Microsystems made two strategic moves Monday to answer calls from its user base, by announcing the company's first general-purpose server to run Linux and bringing back a version of its Solaris operating system that runs on Intel chips. From September, Sun will offer Solaris x86 8.0, alongside Linux on its new 'Big Bear' Intel hardware that it will announce this morning in San Francisco. And from early next year, Solaris 9.0 for Intel will be an option, too. Read the news at InfoWorld and TheRegister. Our Take: It seems that the SecretSix team made it! x86 Solaris 9 is back!

The news from the Gobe Software front seem to be slightly sad, but only at first glance. Sad because, Gobe as we know it is no more, as it sold the gobeProductive source code and rights to FreeRadicalSoftware, Inc. However, FreeRadicalSoftware's business plan requires them to GPL the popular office suite, allowing everyone to access gobeProductive's source for Windows, Linux and even BeOS. The official announcement is expected next week. FreeRadicalSoftware was created recently by the ex-boss of Gobe Software, Bruce Hammond, and some other ex-Gobe and non-Gobe people. Read more for our exclusive interview with Bruce regarding the open sourcing of GP3 under the GPL.
Update: And an additional comment from Gobe's Tom Hoke.

"As the economic downturn has taken its toll on GNU/Linux companies, many surviving companies have decided to move away from the desktop market, and focus on the server instead. This escalated to an alarming pace after the death of Eazel, a startup that created the Nautilus file manager, and while the focus-on-server mania has calmed down lately, it is still very much alive. Yet, it seems to me, that focusing on the server will in the end cause these companies to loose not only the desktop, but the server as well." Find out why at OfB.biz.