AOL Time Warner's Netscape division placed its Netscape 6.2 (NS 6.2) browser-suite upgrade for the Linux, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows platforms on its FTP servers today. In related news, K-Meleon 0.6 for Windows released today while Galeon for Unix is marching for version 1.0. Both applications are trimmed down Mozilla-based browsers, specifically coded for speed and efficiency. Update: MozillaNews.org wrote a review of the latest browser suite from Netscape.

Back when I used to live in Greece, there was a popular saying: "Greece is not just Athens". Similarly, Linux is much more than (the highly marketed) Red Hat or Mandrake. Assuming you got the skills required, a Linux distribution can be created, distributed or sold by virtually anyone. This is what Free Software is all about anyway. Two Sweedish Linux coders are offering their own Linux distros for some months now (with newer versions on the way). Per Lidén has put together CRUX from scratch, while John Eriksson has evolved a lightweight Slackware version to his own ROOTLinux. OSNews interviews both the developers regarding their (part-time, hobby) projects and their future prospects.

Following up on last week's interesting interview with REBOL's own Carl Sassenrath, Rebol Technologies announced today that StreamCast, makers of Morpheus and next generation peer-to-peer content distribution networks, will base Morpheus 2.0 on REBOL's X Internet operating system (IOS) technology to provide interactive programmable content to more than 30 million users by the end of the year.

The German Linux web site Tuximus is interviewing the KDE 3 co-ordinator, Dirk Mueller. Dirk talks about how KDE compares to the Windows desktop and Gnome, about KDE 3 and more.

WINE is definetely not an emulator. Neither a runtime. Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix featuring a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes (some screenshots here). Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% open source Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. WINE's project leader and CodeWeavers' software engineer (a company which sells a modified WINE version), Alexandre Julliard, answers a series of questions to OSNews regarding the project and its future.

One step install. OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command (as root). Darwin-only users will have to take a few extra steps to fetch wget or curl to their computers. The beta sources are the first addition to the new BSD-style source tree. The team hopes to eventually mirror the Apple's Darwin source code there, but in BSD src tree format. In other news, they also have a new Fortran distribution for Darwin and OSX.1 users."

With the release of WindowsXP, the well-known technical web site have published three articles: "Price, Performance, Pitfalls": Which edition? How fast? How compatible? Answers from the Labs. "The First Few Weeks": Much to like, but room for improvement. "It's Finally Here": A collection of news, reviews and XPlanations from around Ziff Davis. We should also not forget the very interesting --technically-- article they featured some months ago, regarding kernel enhancements to be found in WindowsXP's kernel.

Access Control Lists (ACL) is a way to support fine-grained per-user or per-group permissions for files and directories. POSIX-like Access Control Lists are now part of many commercial UNIX systems but with these patches available, the same level of flexibility is available for Linux. Extended Attributes are arbitrary name/value pairs that are associated with files or directories. They can be used to store system objects (e.g. capabilities of executables, Access Control Lists) and user objects (e.g. the character set or mime type of a file). The patches support specific kernel versions and only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Filesystems like SGI's XFS under Linux support extended attributes (meta-data) natively. Other operating systems that have similar meta-data support built-in to their filesystems are Windows2K/XP, BeOS and AtheOS.

PC Magazine offers a six-way shootout between Red Hat, SuSE, Debian (Potato), Caldera, Mandrake, and Turbo Linux. Red Hat takes top honors in the final reckoning (which can be viewed by downloading a PDF on the last page of the report.) From the article: "Widespread industry acceptance and ease of use make Red Hat's distro a solid choice for general use, but don't rule out other distributions until you've studied them and know which excel at specific tasks."

A new release of the development versions of GTK+ and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, Atk) is available at GTK's FTP site. In this unstable version of 1.3.10 (which it will become GTK+ 2.0) you can find GtkTextView fixes, drag-n-drop fixes to generic code and widgets and many Win32 fixes and improvements. More details at Linux Programming web site.

It's only been out for a day, but Windows XP already needs 20MB of updates, according to C|Net-News. Some of the updates fix security holes, others resolve glitches and a few add new features. This upgrade also purports to sort out problems with Pagemaker, Dreamweaver, McAfee VirusScan, Money 2000 and RealPlayer 7.0 among many others.

Tuxia Labs announced a new release of NxZilla, a set of libraries that allow Mozilla to be used with a Nano-X server. This release includes a number of improvements over the last release, including True type font support, image alpha and scaling improvements, as well as UI and general bug fixes.

A few days ago we hosted an interview with the OpenBeOS team leader but I received a number of emails asking us for more information regarding the other effort to 'save' BeOS, BlueOS. BlueOS uses Linux kernel 2.4.12 as its basis, and Xfree. For now, they are building a BeOS look-alike Interface Kit and the app_server on top of XFree, so it is not just a simple window manager, but a whole new API and environment. In future versions, the BlueOS team will completely bypass XFree and have a stand alone BeOS compatible app_server which will only use some of the XFree's system calls to be able to use its 2D/3D drivers. But let's read what the French coder Guillaume Mailard has to say about the project. Guillaume also sent us a screenshot which shows the custom BeOS-alike GUI the team have already coded the last few months, currently running under BeOS (and this is why they have shared that code with the OpenBeOS team) and it is currently ported to Linux.

Microsoft's next-generation OS is finally here. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is walking the streets of London calling Windows XP the 'no compromise' operating system--both reliable, and compatible while Bill Gates officially launches the product, and what could be the company's most important product in more than six years.