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.

Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is the most recent version of the Internet Explorer 6 core technologies in most Windows OSes.Total download size for a typical installation is approximately 25 MB. However, because setup downloads only those files that are necessary for your computer, this size can vary between 11 and 75 MB. In the beset case, users who have already applied the WindowsXP SP1, might only need to download a few KBs.

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.

Too hot to handle: Intel aims to launch the P4 3.6 GHz in mid-2003. For this exclusive report, Tom's Hardware Guide tested CPUs of the future, bringing you benchmarks for P4s in the 3.6 GHz, 3.33 GHz and 3.06 GHz variations. The article also tests against the future AMD AthlonXP 3000+ and 3400+. Update: More information on Intel's plans and technogies for the future.

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.

This is the brand new version of Simply GNUstep, a Linux distribution that only includes applications based on the GNUstep 1.4.0/GUI 0.8.0 APIs or WindowMaker's NeXT UI style. The ISO is 275 MB and this time can be installed on its own partition, however its new installer can cause problems on multi-boot PCs, so the author marked this release as a Developer Release 1. The distro was re-created from scratch (doesn't use Red Hat anymore) and it is built with GCC 3.1 for i586+. Screenshots available.

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

Mac OS X users know when a product doesn't quite "feel right", and so do product reviewers. Despite the similarities that seem to exist between the Microsoft Windows 95/98/2000 and Windows XP user interfaces (UI) and the Aqua interface of Mac OS X, there are significant appearance and behavioral differences. A successful Windows to Mac OS X transition requires abandoning key elements of the Windows user experience in favor of the Mac OS X alternatives. This document outlines typical areas of concern when porting a Microsoft Windows application to Mac OS X, and provides guidance for transitioning to the Mac OS X UI.

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.

" Still, Open Source software fails to lead in many areas. This could be from a historical disadvantage -- the means of connecting and organizing people for sizable Open Source projects only recently became available and are only starting to approach the tight-knit nature of companies. But I think it's for a whole different reason. Open Source software lacks leadership, unity and direction." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

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.

Read the five newly released AMD x86-64 architecture tech documents in PDF format.

The Windows XP Service Pack 1 is now available from the Microsoft servers. This official SP is based on 'build 1106' and it weighs 133 MB. Some users have noticed a snappier interface along with the bug fixes, new drivers and features included. The official announcement is expected on Monday. Update: OSNews reader James, sent us a screenshot with the error message you get when trying to install SP1 on a pirated WindowsXP copy.

Guillaume Maillard of the BlueEyed OS is talking to TotallyBe. He speaks of the differences between their project and OBOS and Cosmoe. He also claims that when programmed for and/or patched the right way, the Linux kernel and XFree can be very fast and perform pretty adequately to BeOS 5 (UI responsiveness - the main advantage of the BeOS experience), while in most of the "other" cases, Linux is much faster than BeOS 5 (eg. server operations, compilation times, SMP scaling, VM etc).