Sun on Wednesday will announce plans for inexpensive desktop computers based on the free Linux operating system in a bid to undermine archrival Microsoft (related article at NYTimes). The OS is based on Red Hat Linux, but with many touches by Sun. Red Hat's version 8 adds a "personal desktop" option that will "create a system ideal for home or desktop use," according to the software maker.

As Microsoft Corp. prepares to unleash new software over the next year, including the Windows .Net Server 2003 family, the next version of its Office productivity suite and three server infrastructure applications, Jim Allchin, group vice president for platforms at the Redmond, Wash., company, sat down with eWeek Senior Editor Peter Galli in San Jose, Calif., to discuss this next round of software releases.

First, a little background. I am a Windows user who has been using Windows since 3.1. I am not a programmer or a developer, I am a user. I process photos, use the internet, e-mail, write letters, play the ever important games and even use it to develop my comic strips. I am not computer illiterate and I use my computer with confidence and skill. Now with that said. I hate Windows.

From LWN: "Linus has just merged the XFS filesystem into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in the 2.5.36 kernel. XFS is a high-performance, journaling filesystem from SGI; it now becomes the fourth journaling filesystem (alongside ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS) supported by the Linux kernel. (Other stuff which has been merged, so far, for 2.5.36 includes an IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") update, the next big set of IDE patches, the "huge page" patch for i386 systems, and a number of other tweaks)."

PortingManager is a free tool that provides assistance when porting C and C++ Solaris applications to zSeries Linux. PortingManager scans a source code tree, looks for Solaris APIs, flags them, and provides documentation that is useful when porting the API from a Solaris-specific function call to an equivalent Linux function call.

In a new Amiga editorial for Suite101, John Chandler focusses on the Amiga solutions already available and what we can soon expect from Amiga Inc. Among this are AmigaDE enabled Zaurus PDAs and smartphones, AA availability in mainstream European shops and AmigaOS 4.0 scheduled for a pre-Christmas launch.

Lindows and Earthlink have entered into a partnership wherein Earthlink dial-up services will be pre-configured on Lindows systems, much the way that dialup access is available with a few clicks on Windows and Mac computers. More at internetnews.com.

An eWeek article notes that Apple Computer is reorganizing the OS 9 engineering effort, presumably re-assigning engineers to work on OSX-related projects. Also, a former head of OS Engineering at Apple will be moving to Apple's Powerschool division.

From the official note: The Gentoo Linux 1.4 release candidate 1 is gcc 3.2-based, supporting optimizations for Pentium III, Pentium 4, Athlon (Classic through XP,) K6 (Classic through K6-3,) PowerPC G3 and PowerPC G4 with AltiVec. Also included is a new 2.4.19-based high-peformance kernel with IBM EVMS (enterprise volume management) support, countless enhancements to Portage and a new "live" bootable CD that boots directly into a runtime version of Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc1. Includes KDE 3.0.3, KDE 3.1-beta1, KOffice 1.2, OpenOffice 1.0.1, GNOME 2.0.1 (2.0.2 on the way) and Mozilla 1.0 (1.1 available for testing). The "rc1" release includes bootable CD ISOs for x86, stage tarballs for PPC and Sparc64 (ISOs on their way) and new Alpha Processor stage1 support. Update: Unreal Tournament 2003 Gentoo CD! Read on.

"The struggle between Microsoft and Java advocates for the hearts and minds of application developers is moving to its next battlefield--and this is a phase in which the number of installed licenses could eventually outnumber everything else to date by an order or magnitude. In the rounds fought so far, Microsoft comfortably repulsed Java's aspirations to displace it on the desktop (at least for now). The struggle for the server looks likely to be an uneasy standoff between entrenched .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition camps. But on mobile devices, everything is still in play. The battle to be the platform of choice across this wide range of devices has barely begun, but it already looks like the primary candidates to cover a large portion of the space will be Microsoft .Net Compact Framework and Java 2 Micro Edition." Read more at InformationWeek.

"We see the desktop as only a piece of the entire operating system product; integration must extend beyond the desktop. We also believe that users care most about functionality and integration rather than the underlying technology. For these reasons, we have created a single desktop look and feel for Red Hat Linux rather than maintaining two unrelated configurations." Very good stuff over there from Owen Taylor, the Red Hat Desktop Team member.

"It is a surprising fact that anyone studying GNUstep or the Cocoa Framework will notice they are nearly identical to the NEXTSTEP APIs that were defined ten years ago. A decade is an eternity in the software industry. If the framework (and its programming language--Objective C) came through untouched these past ten years, there must be something special about it. And Objective-C has done more than survive; some famous games including Quake and NuclearStrike were developed using Objective-C." Read the introduction to Objective-C at LinuxJournal.

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).

Here you can find the latest updates to QNX Momentics. These packages contain software to update your development environment. For the NC version, you would be able to download the PhShutdown and PhLocale Security patches and a Package Filesystem patch.