From Daemonnews: Jason Thorpe has committed some socket code to the NetBSD-current source tree, and bumped the OS revision to 1.6C. For some apps, this can be a major performance improvement.

"There are subtle lessons about freedom in the GPL, but you'll never find them by just reading the license. Instead, you'll have to read between the lines (so to speak) and try to see what can't be seen. Furthermore, these lessons, despite being deceptively simple, could have a profound impact on human freedom if only people understood them. In a sense, software freedom can be seen as a metaphor for human freedom." Read the editorial at Advogato. Update: Checking out my email this morning, I found a submission about another new article on Free Software.

"AMD fanboys have taken on the characteristics of Apple computer lovers, and are hell bent on destroying the plucky little microprocessor vendor with smothering love, if you can call it love. They're trashing the company. For the love of AMD, let's all stake our claim to independence and run the colonizing freakazoids off the Web before they impose more of their imperious ways on the rest of the PC market. Happy fourth." Read the editorial at TomsHardware.

Not everyone's happy with the default look and feel of MacOSX. So the Unsanity LLC guys have come to fullfil feature requests from many MacOSX users. They have written applications that are basically "hacks" (Unsanity prefers the word "haxies"), that they change MacOSX, sometimes in a pretty fundamental way. We tested three of their products, Fruitmenu, WindowShadeX and Xounds.

The Cosmoe 0.5.4 release is a relatively minor update which further improves the configuration script and the Makefiles that it touches. New in this release is the ability to create a DirectFB-enabled target.

This is not exactly OS news, but they are definately interesting geek news. A lot of things have been said about Matrox Parhelia's inability to beat the GeForce4 Ti or the Radeon 8500 in pure FPS, however, also a lot have been said that the point of Parhelia is to offer some advanced 3D features and great rendering quality. This great quality and advanced features (like displacement mapping) can be seen in the first 12 screenshots of the Imperium Galactica III: Genesis web site. This game is the first to be released that it has been optimized for the Parhelia. Enjoy the view.

libferris is a virtual filesystem (VFS) that runs in the user address space. This means that applications using libferris will use the shared libraries API to access the filesystem which may then delegate to the kernel using libc to perform the desired actions. Operating in the user address space allows libferris to mount things that one would generally not want the kernel to mount. For example libferris mount Berkeley database files, ftp sites, XML files, rpm files, sockets, sysv IPC, mysql databases and remote computers using ssh as a filesystem.

"The widely anticipated update to Apple Computer's Mac OS X will appear earlier than expected, sources say, which is good news for the company in a tough year." Read the report at News.com.

The company, along with Java backers, is preparing a new release of its Java software for cell phones that it hopes will prevent a splintering of the Java market and stave off rivals such as Microsoft. Read the report at News.com.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0.2. KDE 3.0.2 primarily provides useability and stability enhancements over KDE 3.0.1, which shipped in late May 2002. The new KDE version also compiles with GCC 3.1, so it would be a great opportunity to build it manually for better perfomance (change the "i686" option with the kind of CPU you have).

"MandrakeSoft would gain nothing by joining United Linux, and doing so would damage our reputation. Joining United Linux could destroy many of the features that have made Mandrake Linux so widely popular, such as our "easy to install, easy to use" approach. It should be noted that several recent polls indicate that the four United Linux companies currently rank lower than Mandrake Linux in market share." Read the rest of the MandrakeSoft's position on UnitedLinux.

"Recently Dennis E. Powell wrote a commentary entitled "The future belongs to GNOME; inertia, to KDE" that has generated much feedback, and a lot of flames in the KDE community. From my perspective as a software company that was/is doing KDE specific applications I think I see where the fundamental disconnect is between the two, and in my discussions with a number of the core developers, they have substantiated my opinion on this." Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.

Remember the Pepper competition on OSNews two months ago? This is a quick note to let you know that Pepper, the popular Windows/MacOS editor, is now available on FreeBSD and Linux (x86/PPC).

David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.