"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.

A builder.com article discusses the increasing use of Java as a tool for developing embedded systems. Primarily because of the portability benefits that java brings, it has become a very popular option in the past year or so. The article covers the upsides and downsides of Java in embedded systems.

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."

" Is Sun going to open up Java? Certainly, Sun is moving in that direction. According to Gingell, Sun realized that it had to figure out a way to let open source organizations like the Apache Software Foundation license Java. Along those lines, Gingell says Sun intends to open-source Java, but that it's not a simple process because Sun doesn't own all the intellectual property in all the JSRs. For the same reasons it can't open source all of Solaris, Sun apparently can't legally open source all of Java either. The company is working on clearing the legal hurdles cleared." Read the article at TechUpdate.

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!

With little fanfare, User Mode Linux (UML) has been merged into Linus' BitKeeper tree. The merge followed a patch by UML author Jeff Dike, resynching UML with the 2.5.34 development kernel.From the UML homepage, User-Mode Linux provides you with a virtual machine that offers "a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux processes. Run buggy software, experiment with new Linux kernels or distributions, and poke around in the internals of Linux, all without risking your main Linux setup."

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).

I was reading the commenting section of our recent Gentoo Linux story about its 1.4-RC1 release. It seems that there is a chasm between Gentoo users, the users who are happy with it the way it is, and the users who can't stand its usage shortcomings. The first group are mostly developers, the second group seems to be only users. Linux always had such a "schism", but with (the source-based) Gentoo distribution it seems that this is even bigger. Here is a proposal to the Gentoo maintainers about a possible solution of how to change Gentoo's usagebility in order to satisfy all.

"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.

"Intel is to embed certificates into the processor. Embedded certificates will be a feature of Banias processors next year. What are the downsides? You can count them. The business of ownership of a device suddenly becomes very important indeed - your PC is tagged at birth, and your choice of operating system or browser is contingent on the generosity of the certification authority." Read the report at TheRegister.

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.

Palm's biggest challenge with respect to OS 5 may be migrating its sizeable and valuable developer community, which has populated the handheld landscape with Palm devices and applications. Read the editorial at NewsFactor.

Here is an interesting Apache article worth taking the time to look at. It provides information and details on how to secure dynamic content on an Apache Web server. Topics covered include general security issues pertaining to dynamic content, securing Server Side Includes, configuring the Apache Common Gateway Interface, and wrappering dynamic content.

Trolltech today announced the release of Qt 3.1 beta 1. This new version brings simplified creation of ActiveX controls, Motif integration enables gradual migration, Mac OS X integration and more.