We've had a couple of conversations with the very affable Greg Estes, SGI's VP of Corporate Marketing, over the past couple of months. Here they are patched together. Greg talks to us about SGI, Hollywood, tough financial times, Linux, and everything. On related news, SGI now owns a... world record.

The GNOME Desktop 2.0.2 Release Candidate 1, "The Considerable Duck", is now available. The GNOME 2.0.x Desktop releases are devoted to bugfixes, translations, user interface consistency, and general polish of our major 2.0 Desktop release. PCLinuxOnline also reports about Dropline GNOME, which is a version of the GNOME Desktop 2.x that has been tweaked for Slackware Linux systems. It is available in Slackware's standard .tgz package format, in addition to the usual source code.

OneStat.com, today reported that Microsoft's Windows operating system has a global usage share of 97.46 percent. Microsoft's Windows still dominates the global operating system market. The global usage share of for Apple's Macintosh operating system is 1.43 percent and is the second most popular operating system in the world. The three most popular operating systems according to OneStat are: 1. Windows 97.46%, 2. Macintosh 1.43%, 3. Linux 0.26%. All numbers are an average of the last 2 months. The other big statistics company, StatMarket, placed (in June 2002) Microsoft at around 95%, MacOS at 2.4% and Linux around 0.35%.

It is September, and that means brilliantly colored leaves, cooler weather, and a new Mandrake Linux release. As the big day for Mandrake Linux 9.0 approaches, Open for Business's Timothy R. Butler talked with Mandrake co-founder Gaël Duval about the company's past, present, and future.

Microsoft has posted a position available for an engineer who will be responsible for researching modification chips that can be used to circumvent security on the Xbox, according to a ZDNet article. It looks like Microsoft is interested in heading off the efforts of the Xbox Linux Project. Currently, it is possible to install Linux on an Xbox and use it like a PC, but you must install a mod chip to circumvent the Xbox's "feature" that prevents an outside OS from booting from a CD.

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s refusal to release Solaris 9 for non-Sun x86 hardware could backfire and drive developers and users to Linux or even Microsoft Corp. platforms, users said. Disgruntled x86 community developers and customers charge that Sun's refusal to reach a compromise is effectively making their investments in non-Sun x86 hardware obsolete. Supporters are so irked by Sun's intransigence that last week they placed an open letter in The Mercury News, of San Jose, Calif., accusing Sun Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy of taking the developer community for granted.

HP has fired Bruce Perens - the leading Open Source evangelist and former Debian project lead - for Microsoft-baiting, he says. "It came after a long, long warning," Perens told the New York Times. "The thing that I did that was most hazardous for HP is the Microsoft-baiting I tend to do."

At my Rolla, Missouri, home, I have a desktop computer running Red Hat Linux and a laptop running Windows 2000. They are networked and I lived happily with that for a long time. This summer I had to stay in California for six weeks so I decided to take the laptop with me and send the desktop from Mailboxes Etc.

The latest release of Mac-On-Linux now includes MacOS X support. Check out these screenshots of MacOSX 10.2, also known as Jaguar, running under Linux. Please note that Mac-On-Linux is not an emulator, but it's more like VMWare, therefore, it can only run on some PPC hardware.

You can now download the latest Mandrake 9 RC-2. Reportedly, it includes XFree 4.2.1 and Koffice 1.2.

Slow news day today, so here is a new poll. Vote for the architecture that Apple should switch to, if such a switch is necessary. Please note that we did not include options like MIPS, SPARC or Crusoe as they do not make much sense at this point as suitable candidates for different reasons each. But the most popular choices are listed and awaiting your vote!

MacNN reports on some unofficial IBM comments that took place in a briefing of IBM's high performance computing technology meeting. The asked presenter said that the Power4 derivative CPU is not for Apple. Its 160 instructions that will be introduced in the new CPU are not Altivec and that IBM pitched the desktop Power4 to Apple, but Apple was not interested. This new information, if true, again turns the posibility for the future of the Macs to x86 as the Motorola G5 is a dead horse by all accounts, OSNews heard. eWeek recently reported in the existance of an x86-based MacOSX, codenamed Marklar.

OSNews reader Don Cox writes: "Dock system for the new AmigaOS is shown here. The author is Stefan Robl, who also has an interesting Coldfire-based hardware project. Would users of Mac OS X like to compare this Amiga dock with the Mac one?" Our Take: The Dock for AmigaOS4 sounds good, but it does not look good. While it is said to be customizable, the defaults matter. I hope the author lose the background image for the dock, and instead deliver something professional-looking, refined and clean for the final version of the OS. Some alpha around the icons wouldn't hurt either.

Microsoft is clearing the fog around its move into 64-bit computing. At the Windows .Net Server DevCon conference here this week, Microsoft devoted much of its time to a new 64-bit Windows release and accompanying applications, which are due to reach customers early next year.