SkyOS is a home brewed operating system, created by Robert Szeleney in the last few years as a hobby project. As SkyOS gets bigger and more advanced, its popularity and importance are also growing, driving the 3-member team to add more and more functionality. Latest in their efforts is the -- already working according to the SkyOS web site-- Linux emulation layer which runs Linux binaries natively, without recompiling. Among their future plans is also a Windows emulation layer. But SkyOS is much more than emulation layers, it has a personality and functionality of its own. Read more for what Robert has to say about SkyOS and its future.

From Wired: "It started as a crusade for free source code. Linux zealots turned it into a full-frontal assault on Microsoft. Now the battle for the desktop could snatch defeat from the jaws of moral victory." This is the teaser of a four page interesting editorial from Russ Mitchell found on Wired. The author recognises that "Linux has a real shot in the enterprise business", but he believes that Linux is never going to get a respectful share of the desktop market, and he presents a number arguments for it. He also includes statements from many people like Rob Malda and Red Hat employees who, surprisingly, state that the real enemy for their business today is not Microsoft (where most of their joe-user customers are far reached from Linux's "nerd" market), but companies like Sun and the "traditional" Unices like Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX and Tru64.

Forcing a developer to use multithreading, which is pretty complex for most programmers to code for, it is the wrong way to go for an OS. There was some controversy about this, but at the end, the experienced programmers agreed. And Maarten Hekkelman, of the Pepper fame (Maarten is also the same person who wrote the BeOS debugger when he was hired by Be to do so), seems to agree too: There won't be a Pepper for BeOS, just because the BeOS design does not make it easy to code such a big and complex app. Before you start replying in this story, make sure you read all the comments here. Our Take: I love BeOS, but BeOS is not perfect. In fact, what Be's marketing was trying to sell as the best feature of BeOS, pervasive multithreading, it is also its most weak spot. Now you know why big apps crashing too much under BeOS, and why there are not many big apps available anyway. Too hard to code big apps for such an environment, for most developers. Take Scooby for example. This person's multithreading code, is far below par, and mind you, Mr Takamatsu is an experienced developer. Scooby still crashes too much though and locks up the app_server at times, in a spaghetti multithreading confusion... Same goes for Gim-ICQ and lots of other apps.Update: Maarten Hekkelman responded to our comment section explaining his decision and Pepper's design.

In an interview with the St Petersburg Times, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer stressed most emphatically (is he ever not emphatic?) that his company is not an "Evil Empire." He says, "I don't think it's right and I think it causes people to make decisions which are not even in their best interest . . . A, we're not evil. B, we're not an empire." A Siliconvalley.com article has the entire interview with Microsoft's energetic CEO.

Progeny Linux, have announced that they will no longer be producing their shrink wrapped distribution of Debian Linux. Progeny plans to continue its Linux consulting service. The company cited the expense of producing a boxed distro in an increasingly competitive market, and the fact that its offerings are now mostly available in the main Debian archive.

Apple will probably be satisfied this month, seen Motorola completing the G5, the next generation of PPC CPUs, which it will be 64-bit, but it will also run 32-bit code in almost full speed. Apple is preparing a 64-bit version of MacOSX and they insist that porting the OSX apps over to the new CPU, it will be as easy as recompiling the app for the new CPU. The CPU will clock from 1 GHz to 1.6 GHz for its first generation. For now, Apple has released a long awaited dual 800 G4 machine, while it upgrades the iBook and PowerBook series of laptops with more RAM, speed and features. In the meantime, Transmeta announced yesterday their new Crusoe CPU which it will clock 1 Ghz and it will be available sometime next year. Intel is getting ready to release the first mobile Pentium4, which it will start clocking at 1.5 Ghz, while AMD strugles to produce new products that can compete with Intel directly and finds refuge in marketing tricks, renaming their line of CPUs as Athlon XP or Athlon 1800+. Same tricks Cyrix was doing 3-4 years ago when they could not produce CPUs with faster clock speed than the competition.

There's a relatively short how-to article called Debian GNU/Linux for BeOS Refugees that introduces BeOS users to Debian. To actually switch over to using Debian for your everyday OS, you'll have to do a lot more reading and work than the article helps you with, but it's a good start nonetheless.

After 5 months in public beta testing, QT 3.0, the next incarnation of the popular multi-platform GUI Toolkit from TrollTech has been released. Qt 3.0 introduces a large number of new and powerful features: The ability to build platform- and database independent database applications, greatly improved internationalisation and font handling, rich text engine that also supports richtext input/editing in addition to rendering, Qt Designer, a full-fledged GUI builder that now supports main window development, and includes an integrated C++ editor, Qt Linguist provides easy translation of Qt GUIs to different languages, Qt Assistant eases browsing and finding information in the Qt Documentation. In addition there are numerous other improvements such as Multiple Monitor Support, HTTP network protocol support, Support for latest evolutions in GUIs, Accessibility support and 64-bit Safety. Qt 3.0 also features a new and powerful Regular Expression Engine, which greatly simplifies complex text-manipulation operations. The syntax is compatible to, and as powerful as, Perl regular expressions, while at the same time including full support for Unicode. QT 3.0 is the basis for the next KDE and while it breaks binary compatibility, it keeps source compatibility with QT 2.x.

From the article at Kerneltrap: "This week's profile interview is with Robert Love who currently maintains the preemptible kernel patches, among other things. He's been using Linux now for about 7 years, with numerous contributions in the current kernel. All of this is best described in his own words."

LinuxJournal has released the results of its 2001 Reader's Choice Awards, voted by 6,500 Linux users. Red Hat took the top spot for favorite Linux distribution, KDE for favorite desktop environment, and C for programming language.

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Avault.com reports: Owners of NVIDIA 3D graphics accelerators now have new drivers available to download. TNT, TNT2, GeForce, GeForce2, GeForce 3, Quadro, and Quadro2 owners who have Windows 95, 98, and ME can download Detonator XP version 21.83 drivers here. Windows 2000 users with the same cards can download their version 21.83 drivers here, while this page hosts new version 22.20 drivers for Windows XP 64-bit users.

Linus Torvalds in the Linux kernel mailing list: "2.4.11 had a fix for a symlink DoS attack, but sadly that fix broke the creation of files through a dangling symlink rather badly (it caused the inode to be created in the very same inode as the symlink, with unhappy end results). Happily nobody uses that particular horror - or _almost_ nobody does. It looks like at least the SuSE installer (yast2) does, which causes a nasty unkillable inode as /dev/mouse if you use yast2 on 2.4.11." So, 2.4.12 was born, changelog here.

Editorial at BusinessWeek: "The new OS X operating system is a triumph, but Jobs & Co. need to keep its predecessor on life support until Mac heads get the message Has the Mac's classic operating system become like Ole Betsy, a beloved but aging workhorse that must now be put out to pasture? If you ask me, this Ole Betsy has stayed around way past her prime. Still, she ain't a-going out to graze on the lower 40 acres any time soon."