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.

"Down at the bottom of Bill Gates' keynote to the Professional Developers Conference yesterday lies confirmation that the wheels have come off the Windows rollout wagon." TheRegister reports. Windows Longhorn is scheduled for release in 2003, while Blackcomb, which will be the real .NET OS, is scheduled for sometime due to 2005. WindowsXP is not far away though, as the official retail release is due tomorrow.

"Competitor Scott Draeker isn't impressed with TransGaming Technologies' plan to use its version of Wine to get Windows games to work on Linux. Not so fast, says Draeker, whose Loki Entertainment has been the flagship company of that "traditional" approach. Draeker has doubts about games running on Wine working as well as games actually made to run on Linux. Although Loki filed for bankruptcy back in August, the company has continued to release games, including Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns in late August and Postal Plus 'coming soon.'" Read the rest of the article on NewsForge.

The Gartner Group, the well known consulting and analyst firm, is analyzing Linux progress and future. Interesting read, as it offers explanations behind IBM's $1 billion investement on Linux among other information. Our Take: We don't know what the future holds, but there is a new Linux kernel just released (2.4.13) while SuSE is to start shipping its new, SuSE Linux 7.3 distribution in the United States and North America today.

"Richard Dale recently announced that he has committed C bindings for the KDE3/Qt3 libraries to KDE's CVS. Richard generated the C bindings automatically using a hacked kdoc, with relatively little manual intervention. According to him, "The bindings wrap about 800 classes 13,000 methods, with 200k of C/C++ generated." The same hacked kdoc can also generate Objective C and Java bindings, and Richard hopes to be able to consolidate generation of these various KDE bindings (Java/Objective C/C) with this one tool." Get the rest of the news at .DOT KDE.

A new version of the interesting 100% in x86 assembly operating system, MenuetOS, was released today. The new version brings Voodoo VESA support (which was the most requested feature) and a simple Linux emulation layer. The whole OS (and all of its applications) fits in a 1.44 floppy disk, so there is no need for partitioning your hard drive if you want to try out MenuetOS. Recently, OSNews hosted an exclusive interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the MenuetOS creator.

InfoAnarchy has an interesting story about Microsoft's shady OEM practices. Everyone who believes in competition on the OS market should read it. The article is an extension of Scot Hacker's "He who controls the boot loader" article, published 2 months ago and had put lot of people into deep thinking regarding Microsoft's business practices.