"Will your next portable computer be a tablet PC? Microsoft hopes so, and it has lined up a handful of partners that are showing prototype models of its reference design and plan to ship the real thing in mid-2002. For the second year here at Comdex, the software behemoth is pushing tablet computing that combines the portability of a laptop, the convenience of pen and paper, and of course Microsoft software." Read the rest of the news report at PCWorld.

Descriptive Quote from the OSOpinion editorial: "Open source and free software were founded on the idea that all information and knowledge should be made freely available for the benefit of all, and what is software but the embodiment of knowledge? Unfortunately, much of today's open software is not free in one important respect. The use of copyright and the General Public License (GPL) restricts its commercial exploitation."

A new snapshot of the (AMD's 64-bit Hammer CPU) x86-64 Linux kernel tree has been released. It is based now on the 2.4.14 kernel. Changes to previous snapshot: Merged to 2.4.14 and some bug fixes. For information on how to compile and use it see at their main web site, full source tarball and patch against Linux 2.4.14 are available.

This week, KernelTrap spoke with Neal Walfield of the GNU/Hurd development team. From their project FAQ, "'Hurd', as an acronym, stands for `Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons'. Hird, in turn, stands for `Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth'. The Hurd is a radical departure from UNIX. A unique and interesting approach to solving many of the problems found in current operating systems. While it's not yet production grade, it's evolved enough to be quite usable.

The journaling file system ext3 made it to the test version of 2.4.15 Linux kernel and it seems that it will be as standard of the final version of the kernel. ext3 has pretty much the same design and capabilities of ext2, but it adds journaling. Our Take: Can't wait for the day that SGI's next generation, truly advanced file system, XFS, will make it to the main source tree. Update: In a related note, the NTFS driver for Linux was updated today with support for WindowsXP's NTFS 5 among other new features.

Covalent Technologies will release its long-awaited version 2.0 of the Apache Web server software Monday--ahead of software from the larger Apache project itself. Apache 2.0 initially was expected by the end of 2000 but only entered beta testing in April 2001. Covalent decided version 2.0 was ready for prime time, said Jim Zemlin, vice president of marketing.

AMD will drive its Hammer family of 64-bit processors into the mobile market in the second half of 2003, a year or so after it makes its debut in servers, the company revealed at its analysts confab yesterday. However, the company also revealed their full roadmap with details about their desktop add the ClawHammer CPUs.

Gdkxft transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+ 1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (or, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your applications. The latest version of Gdkxft, version 1.3, adds AA support for Mozilla.

Sun has published an article describing how they "transformed the Unix into the leading environment for technical and enterprise computing" with Solaris. The article features a timeline description from SunOS in 1982 to 2001 and Solaris 8. In the meantime, Solaris 9 is still in beta and it is scheduled to be released next year with the following new features:

After earlier announcing plans to create a subsidiary for its operating system, Palm on Thursday said it is looking to divide itself into separate, publicly traded companies. "We are looking to move into external separation next year," acting CEO Eric Benhamou told CNET News.com on Thursday, shortly after the company announced that Carl Yankowski was resigning as Palm's chief executive. The company is also looking into asking David Nagel to become the Palm CEO, while he was originally hired to be the CEO of the new Palm subsidiary -- the OS division -- where the Be engineers and Be's COO Steve Sakoman would be employeed, after the buyout of Be's IP would complete. There is a fair amount of uncertainty in the Palm land, as revenue fell a lot recently and the new PocketPC is a rival that the aged PalmOS can't compete with anymore.

"There is another internet - already operational - where users are receiving connections up to 100 times faster than people at home. It is a network so swift and so powerful its advocates are claiming it has already changed the way we will interact with the internet in the future. This new internet is being developed in universities and research laboratories across the globe. And although its usage might be confined to academics, its benefits could spill over into the mainstream in only a few years. Until now, the race to build the next generation of the internet has been dominated by the US, and by one project. Internet2 is a consortium of 180 universities backed by the National Science Foundation and the US Federal government." Read the rest of the interesting article at the Guardian.

Peter Tattam from Trumpet Software and also the creator of PetrOS wrote in to tell us that " we are exploring the possibility of providing a BeOS layer to PetrOS. This is consistent with our philosophy of providing multiple API support in the OS. I am in discussions with the OpenBeOS group to determine the feasibility of getting OpenBeOS to run in PetrOS. This would involve us writing a BeOS compatible kernel driver, and supporting ELF format executables in addition to the current PE format executables.We will continue our development on the Win32 layer at the same time with a goal of being able to seamlessly run BeOS and Win32 applications on the same desktop." OSNews recently hosted an interview with Peter regarding PetrOS.

Based on Linux Kernel 2.4, Turbolinux 7 Server supports 64 GB of memory, a journal file system, a 128-bit SSL library, and 32 SMP support. It is scheduled to begin shipping on December 7. Turbolinux is focusing on enterprise business needs with this release, as it tried to design this version of the server with extreme flexibility and functionality in mind. "Turbolinux 7 Server offers businesses a highly secure, high-performance operating system," Pete Beckman, vice president of engineering for Turbolinux said in a prepared statement.

Given its size, when IBM talks about Linux, people listen. Two years after IBM laid out its Linux strategy, the company seems to have met its goals and then some. Joe Barr talks to IBM's Linux czar to find what's ahead for the computer giant and open source.