Nicholas Petreley explores desktop Linux beyond GNOME and KDE. In this column, he examines and compares several window-managers, detailing which of these applications is best for different types of users. The article is at LinuxWorld.

Computers of the future could be controlled by eye movements, rather than a mouse or keyboard. Scientists at Imperial College, London, are working on eye-tracking technology that analyses the way we look at things. The team are trying to gain an insight into visual knowledge - the way we see objects and translate that information into actions. Read the report at BBC News.

The initial release of the IBM WebSphere SDK for Web Services on Linux is now available. Developers can easily create Java-based applications for Web service providers and consumers. This offering contains everything developers need in a single convenient package, including a IBM SDK for Java technology, a runtime environment, a private UDDI registry, tools, samples, and documentation. It's based on open specifications for Web services such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI and runs on both Linux and Windows operating systems. The IBM WebSphere SDK for Web Services includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation and is being offered at this time for free.

"Lindows OS - Is this OS the second coming or just another Linux distribution that will fall by the wayside. Since Lindows.com has released its Insiders from the initial Non Disclosure Agreement which was a confidentiality agreement that prevented us from discussing the OS anywhere outside of the Insiders Forum I am now able to give some insight to this mysterious OS." Review is at HiTechMods.

"Microsoft has delayed the third service pack for Windows 2000- Service Pack 3 —for an indefinite period of time, according to internal documents I viewed over the weekend. Win2K was originally due July 17, but Microsoft recently discovered several major bugs in its Microsoft Installer (MSI) 2.0 code, which was to have been bundled with the update. So now the company will remove MS 2.0 from SP3 and include the older version, MSI 1.1, instead, unless feedback from its beta testers and partners indicates that MSI 2.0 must be included. This indecision, obviously, will adversely affect the release schedule for SP3." Read the report at WinInformant. Update: MSI 2.0 to be Included in Windows 2000 SP3.

What would you say if there was a way to support your favorite OS or X11 Desktop Environment by agreeing to use an ad-sponsored version? The ad would show *only once*, during the load of the OS or graphics desktop environment, something like a splash screen, and then it would go away after 5 or 10 seconds or if you manually close its window or after you have clicked to the actual ad. This way, you could be helping financially open source projects, like Gnome, KDE, FreeBSD, Gentoo and others.

"In Dennis Powell's 'The view from the desktop' column last week, he noted a problem with the development of KDE (and other Open Source projects). Generally speaking, KDE developers work on KDE for fun, and while interested, they are not necessarily concerned about the needs of end users. Obviously hobbyist developers should not be required to do anything for those using their code, but this situation often causes features that users want and need to be overlooked." Editorial at LinuxAndMain.

Standards mean little to developers looking for the biggest audience online: Internet Explorer users.
Our Take: OSNews serves more pages to Internet Explorer users than to all the rest, however, being faithful to the multi-platform nature of OSNews, our site is hand-coded and compatible with all mainstream browsers. We include support for WAP and Unix text-mode browsers, AvantGO and other, older (and sometimes... obscure), browsers. More info, in our recent discussion here.

Support for Intel's Itanium 2 CPU continues with 64-Bit Windows .NET servers; WindowsXP 64-Bit Edition Ver. 2003 to be available in early 2003. Read the press release at Microsoft.com. In the meantime, Windows 2000 has been given nine months to live, as far as OEMs are concerned, and Microsoft is pressuring the PC companies to stop offering dual install Win2K/XP systems immediately.

Following widespread skepticism of Microsoft's motives for developing its trusted computing platform, the software giant this week moved to reassure the software community that Palladium will not be limited to Microsoft's platforms. Read the report at ZDNews.

ThinkSecret covers the new MacOSX version, codenamed Jaguar, by publishing an article on what is new and on the kind of updates are to be expected at the end of this summer. There are also a bunch of screenshots included in the article. Part I and Part II.

Cygwin/XFree86 is a port of XFree86 to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It runs on all recent consumer and business versions of Windows and is now installed via Cygwin's setup.exe install. In the meantime, Garnome now is able to build both GNOME 2.0.0 and KDE 3.0.2. Garnome is a tool which automates the process of building GNOME 2 and KDE 3. It keeps track of all the dependencies and standard configuration work. Make sure you export some GCC optimization flags as described here before starting building the software though.

Ladislav Bodnar writes: "Before we start, here is the link: boot.iso. Click on it, then save it to your hard disk. By the time you finish reading this review the ISO image will have downloaded. It will only take a couple of minutes to burn the 16MB image onto a bootable CD, which upon boot, provides easy, logical and well-structured instructions. Several hours later, you will be greeted with a beautiful screen running on top of one of the most popular Linux distributions - SuSE Linux 8.0. The full review by DistroWatch."

New version, two new screenshots and also an implementation of a TCP/IP stack this month holds for MenuetOS. In the meantime, the SkyOS project also gets along and it now features a printing kit along with other feature additions and improvements.