The first article from ZDNet.co.uk is titled "Red Hat broadens desktop push". ITDirectory holds an article titled "Is Linux Coming to a Desktop Near You?", while TheAge discusses Red Hat's decision to unify the two major desktop environments, with an article titled "Unified Linux desktop: good, bad or ugly?".

On September 18th, UnitedLinux, the consortium of Conectiva, The SCO Group (formerly Caldera), SuSE, and Turbolinux, announced that Paula Hunter, an "experienced technology executive and consortium leader," would be its worldwide general manager. The beta will be available on September 23rd, but not from the UnitedLinux site. Users, who want to give it a test drive, should go to one of the partners' sites to download copies of the binaries, ISO images or source code. Gregory said that the open beta would satisfy the needs of both the UnitedLinux industry partners and the open source community." In the meantime, the FSF sent an open letter to UnitedLinux, regarding the GPL violations that might be already in place or to be introduced by its license scheme.

The MacOSX 10.2.1 Update (via OSX's Software Update) delivers enhancements and improvements to the following applications, technologies and components: Mail, Image Capture, Help Viewer, graphics, printing, networking, Rendezvous, Kerberos, USB, FireWire, SCSI device compatibility and includes additional Digital Hub peripheral device support. Also, iTunes 3.0.1 was released today, while in related news, here is a review of MacOSX 10.2 along with the availability of the high end PowerMac.

Get Mandrake 9.0 RC-3, the last beta before the final version, and report bugs back to Mandrake. For screenshots of the new RC-3 Mandrake, check here and here (thanks goes to Gaël Duval from MandrakeSoft for sending us the screenshots). Update: Here is a third shot too.

Today, SuSE Linux has announced the availability of the latest version of SuSE Linux for October 7th. Blending operating system and applications, SuSE's system assistant, YaST2 (Yet another Setup Tool), is the core element and administration center of this comprehensive package for first-time and experienced Linux users. Read the whole press release explaining all the new features. Also, SuSE Linux is the latest vendor to drop Sun Microsystems Inc.'s branded StarOffice 6.0 desktop productivity suite in favor of the free OpenOffice alternative. SuSE on Tuesday confirmed to eWEEK that it had decided not to include StarOffice 6.0 in SuSE Linux 8.1.

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.

These days, the big players in the Linux "purely-desktop market" are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX and the much awaited Xandros Desktop 1.0. OSNews got their hands to the latest version of Xandros (beta3b) and we are giving it a whirl. Read more for information and screenshots.

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.

"Sun is expected to unveil a Frankenstein-like desktop Linux strategy this week, combining various software elements developed in-house or by open-source community projects and third-party vendors. Sun's desktop Linux play, which will be spelled out Wednesday at the start of its SunNetwork conference here, marks another shift for the Santa Clara, Calif., company as its battles industry leader Microsoft for the hearts and minds of corporate users." Read the rest of the article at InfoWorld.

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.

Hewlett Packard has begun to sell Intel Itanium 2-based workstations running Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation. Advanced Workstation is the desktop companion to Red Hat's Enterprise-oriented Advanced Server. HP also sells versions of these workstations running HP-UX, and will probably sell Windows versions eventually, following a future OS release my Microsoft. This is yet more evidence that Red Hat sees some opportunity for Linux on the corporate desktop, at least in the engineering workstation area, where high-priced Unix workstations have traditionally ruled but have been pushed out by NT/2000-on-Intel in recent years. Read more about it at Silicon.com.

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.

Apple put up a knowledge base page about the release of MacOSX 10.2.1, but they later retracted it. It seems that a patch release is pretty close. Read here of what is most likely to come with 10.2.1.

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.