Our friends over at PCLinuxOnline are hosting an interview with the Lindows CEO, Michael Robertson. Nothing really new is revealed by Robertson, but an interesting read nonetheless.

XFce is an easy-to-use environment for X11 based on GTK+. There is an initial version of xfwm4, a brand-new implementation of the window manager for XFce. It is a very lightweight, fast, and fully-themeable window manager compliant with freedesktop.org standards (i.e., fully compatible with KDE 2/3 and GNOME 2). It is based on GTK+ 2.0 and uses pango for font rendering (eg. antialiased text & Unicode). Oliver Fourdan sent us two new screenshots of XFce4 (1, 2), running next to KDE3/Gnome2.

"Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to resort to significantly larger chips or even adding a second processor to the system." The story is at TheRegUS. Alan Cox says that the technology can bring up to 30% more performance than the same CPU running without Hyper-Threading, but special conditions have to be met, for example, the applications need to be programmed as multi-threaded. The right hardware for the right software.

"Sun Microsystems will announce on Wednesday a free software initiative aimed at undercutting Microsoft and other rivals in the battle over Web services software. Sun plans to give away a basic version of its application server software, a key piece of infrastructure software for building business applications. Application server software is technology that runs e-business and other Web site transactions. The giveaway targets computers that run Microsoft's Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems, Sun said." The story is at ZDNews. Our Take: Why does that reminds me Microsoft and their giveaway of IE back in the day, in order to win over Netscape? Microsoft ended up in the courts for it...

The Lycoris folks released the last beta (named "Build 45") before the final release of Lycoris Update2 next month. The first ISO is 500 MB, while the third one, which contains the dev. tools, is 160 MB.

"So far, Linux has run just fine, hasn't crashed, and seems to offer tremendous flexibility, but this comes at the price of complexity. Up to a point, Linux is as easy to use as any other mainstream operating system. But after that point is passed, the water gets very deep, very quickly--as my monitor resolution issue serves to illustrate. Windows also suffers from this "easy up to a point" issue, but the point is a good bit farther down the road than it is in Linux." The second part of David Coursey's trip to the Linux world.

"In an about-face, Microsoft said Tuesday that it will reinstate the ability to run Java programs in Windows XP. Microsoft said it would include its own Java software in the Service Pack 1 update to Windows XP due late this summer. In the long term, though, the company plans to remove Java from Windows altogether." Read the report at News.com.

A short while after the report of the appearance of Microtel PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed at Walmart.com, both Walmart.com and Lindows were claiming that LindowsOS "delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs." Today, that last phrase has gone missing and there is no more talk of running any programs designed for Windows, let alone Microsoft products. Our Take: Oh, they realised that WINE can't run all Windows apps because not all the Win32 APIs are public? Why did it take them more than one year to realise this?

"Microsoft on Moday released an updated version of its Internet Explorer Web browser software for the Macintosh. Version 5.2 of IE for the Mac is available for free from Microsoft's Mactopia Web site. New features include better handling of fonts through OS X 10.1.5's Quartz graphics engine." Read the report at ZDNews. Our Take:The (since forever) text input/form bugs, are still not fixed though...

"Industry sources close to Microsoft's plans say that certain OEMs will be proved with service pack one as early as the end of this month. System integrators have wanted Microsoft to introduce the service pack for some time. At a system builder conference in Monaco earlier this year, Microsoft was suggesting that it could arrive in September." Read the report at TheInquirer.

U.S. software giant Microsof Monday took a swipe at rival mobile operating systems maker Symbian, saying familiarity with Windows will help it be the standard used in new high-performance wireless devices. "It's important (for developers and users) to have access to data they are already familiar with in the PC environment," Derek Brown, director of mobile devices group, told Reuters in an interview. Read the article at Reuters.

"PC repair guru Scott Mueller tells you what your computer's BIOS chip is and what it does. Then he teaches you how to know if you need an upgrade, and how to do it." Read the article at InformIT. Free registration required.

iWindoze writes: "I was just over at the SEAL homepage and noted a thread where the possibility of a brand new rewrite was being kicked around. It looks like SEAL 3.x will be completely rewritten from scratch... Here's the link to the discussion. Also worthy of note, the Hybrid OS web site just went up, and a new release of their version of SEAL is expected soon."