Some Oberon friends emailed us a few days ago and asked for an introduction of the platform to the OSNews readers, so here it is: Oberon started in the '80s, and it is both a native operating system capable of running on its own partition, and a programming platform (based on Pascal/Modula) on top of existing OSes. It seems to be quite active and in fact, there was a recent fork of the official Oberon kernel, becoming the Bluebottle OS, which also seems very active.

Object Desktop 2002 is a desktop enhancement suite designs to allow Windows users to completely transform Windows into anything they want. It includes WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ObjectBar, IconPackager, WinStyles, and more. It also includes a 1 year subscription to ObjectDesktop.NET where users can download all the components of Object Desktop, updates, and new features. Our Take: I was lucky to have a "live" demo of the product from Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell , a few months back. This set of applications truly transform the Windows GUI to something completely different, which is certainly not just skining, but a complete change of how the UI behaves and interacts with the user.

The Rasterman is the founder of the Enlightenment project, an infinitely configurable window manager that is working its way toward becoming a desktop, even though he thinks the desktop battle is lost. In an email interview with LinuxAndMain, he talks about what he's doing, his view of the future of desktop Linux, the nature of development projects (commercial, community-based, and genius-based) and more.

The campaign to free Blender's sources has officially started. 100,000 Euro are needed in order Blender to become open source and be the first truly powerful 3D rendering package for the OSS community. If you can spare some money this weekend, help this great application get freed.

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this week that his company would consider moving to Intel chips, but that he would wait until at least 2003 because the transition to Mac OS X was more important. But with the speed of Power PC hardware increasingly falling behind Intel's chips--The Pentium 4 will hit 3 GHz this year--Apple would be wise to do a bit of research. I recommend AMD's upcoming 64-bit Opteron, which will give Apple a technological leg up on Windows and, perhaps, offer them Windows compatibility through the Opteron's full compatibility with 32-bit x86 code. Come on, Apple: Do the right thing." Read the blurb on WinInformant. Read more for a short commentary. Appendix 21/July/2002: Please read for a small update and more explanations at the end of the article.

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the release of Debian GNU/Linux version 3.0. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, which now supports a total of eleven processor architectures, includes KDE and GNOME desktop environments, features cryptographic software, is compatible with the FHS v2.2 and supports software developed for the LSB. With the addition of the IA-64, HP PA-RISC, MIPS (mips, mipsel), Alpha, and S/390 architectures, Debian GNU/Linux now supports a total of eleven architectures. For the first time, Debian comes with the KDE 2.2. The GNOME desktop environment is upgraded to version 1.4, and X itself is upgraded to the much improved XFree86 4.1.

Remember a month ago, when I urged the open source developers to take on this software and develop something equivelant and multi-platform? It seems that the only people who actually got interested in my $100 USD offer... was Apple.

"Put all these threads together, and it appears that Apple is shifting strategy towards becoming a software company--admittedly, a software company that depends upon its own hardware. In the future, I expect to see more software from Apple, and for more of it to be sold as an upgrade to what users already own, or delivered as a paid service of some sort." Editorial and MacWorld roundup at ZDNews.

Luigi Rizzo has implemented a weight-based process scheduler for FreeBSD-stable, and is in the process of porting it to -current. Read all about it at BSDForums.org.

Perl 5.8.0 is a major new release of the Perl 5 language. It incorporates all development and maintenance changes since the last major release, 5.6.0, including all the changes of 5.6.1.

"Would you give your grandmother a PC with Linux as its main OS? The developers of a Linux startup, Lycoris, have been trying to make the answer a more likely "yes" with their Linux package." Read the review at OnLamp. On a related note, Update 2 of Lycoris Build 44 should be available in 1-2 weeks.

The Idea Basket holds an interesting interview with Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer employee and also Chairman of the IETF ZeroConf, regarding Rendezvous and more.

"Developing the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for a Python application is often a tedious, time-consuming, and opaque process. This is the exact opposite of how Python programmers would describe most other aspects of software development using Python. So what is it about GUI applications that causes them to be so hard?" Read the technical article at OnLamp. Two more Python articles can be found at developerWorks at IBM, here and here.

"Turbolinux, one of the four main Linux commercializers, closed down on Monday, multiple sources say. The company could not be reached for comment late last night when reports started filtering in. It was after normal business hours anywhere in the US. If true, the unconfirmed disaster will be a black eye for the newfangled United Linux initiative that Turbo, Caldera, SuSE and Conectiva, all second stringers, put together a few weeks ago to prop each other up and create a common operating system platform to take up against Linux market leader Red Hat." Read the (unconfirmed yet) report at LinuxGram.