OS News' review of Mac OS X last week certainly stirred up controversy, partially because some die hard Mac fans perceived that it was improper for an outsider (someone who is not an everyday Mac user) to me making broad criticisms after only a superficial introduction to the New operating system. Well, folks, that's why they call it a review. We thought that Apple's major new OS also deserved a road test, and there were two very important events in Mac OS X history just a few days ago that toppled the last major obstacle to making it ready for millions of Mac users to start using it as their everyday OS: the 10.1 release and the release of Microsoft Office X. Last week, I made the switch and started using Mac OS X as my everyday OS. Here's how it went:

From the article at Kerneltrap: "This week's profile interview is with Robert Love who currently maintains the preemptible kernel patches, among other things. He's been using Linux now for about 7 years, with numerous contributions in the current kernel. All of this is best described in his own words."

Wouter van Oortmerssen is a living legend in the Amiga community. Mostly known about his ability to design and code a whole bunch of programming languages throughout the years, interpreted or compiled (counted 38 so far). Today we host a mini-interview with Wouter regarding the SHEEP programming language. SHEEP is a new scripting/querying/ipc/programming language he is doing for Amiga Inc. "Expect familiar beginner friendly syntax and semantics coupled with multimethods, automatic memory management without garbage collection (linearity), powerful datatypes, pattern matching, strong and dynamic typing living together in harmony, integrated access to all the new Amiga OS features, and optional compiled output comparable to C in speed and size."

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I went on and wrote a review about MacOSX 10.0.4 a month ago, but it was never finished as I had to fly to France for my own wedding. I came back and MacOSX 10.1 had been released. I scrapped completely the old text, as 10.1 brings some more speed and new features to the system, and restarted writting the review from scratch.

Linus Torvalds in the Linux kernel mailing list: "2.4.11 had a fix for a symlink DoS attack, but sadly that fix broke the creation of files through a dangling symlink rather badly (it caused the inode to be created in the very same inode as the symlink, with unhappy end results). Happily nobody uses that particular horror - or _almost_ nobody does. It looks like at least the SuSE installer (yast2) does, which causes a nasty unkillable inode as /dev/mouse if you use yast2 on 2.4.11." So, 2.4.12 was born, changelog here.

IBM's OS/2 operating system was once lauded for its ability to run DOS and Windows applications. But, since the release of Windows 95, 32-bit Windows applications haven't been supported. That situation may change soon. Connectix Corp. Tuesday unveiled Virtual PC for OS/2, along with product development and marketing help from software developer InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH and the distribution support of Serenity Systems. The software promises to let corporate users run both Windows and OS/2 applications on one PC. Using Connectix's virtual machine technology, any x86 operating system can be loaded under the "host" operating system.

ZDNews reports that ATI Technology has slashed the price and increased the core clock speed just before it releases the high-end Radeon 8500 graphics board. When ATI introduced the board in mid-August, it announced the price as $399 and the core clock speed as 250MHz. But this week, the company dropped the price to $299 and increased the speed to 275MHz. The graphics board, which will be released Oct. 25, is used to enhance visual effects and 3D images, particularly for video games. The graphics board is also optimized to take advantage of WindowsXP. The card competes head to head with the new nVidia GeForce3 model, Ti 500.

Descriptive quote from the OSOpinion editorial: "Linux has not aggressively exploited the nearly two-year gap between the release of Windows 2000 and the release of Windows XP. With the Home Edition of XP now the standard operating system shipped with most PCs, Linux advocates can no longer use the instability of Windows 95/98/Me as an argument for Linux. Linux advocates missed a golden opportunity to evangelize their platform to these third-party hardware and software companies. Instead, they spent their time arguing over issues like whether KDE or Gnome was a better desktop environment, ignoring how confusing that topic was to other developers." Our Take: I agree that XP is the best offering overall in the OS world today. Faster, much more solid, lots of advances both in the backend in the front end. Life goes on in the Linux camp though, and kernel 2.4.11 was released yesterday. Changelog here.

BeGroovy is running an article claiming that the BeOS source code was distributed via the BeOS-only chatting and file exchange application, BeShare, resulting in the shut down of the main BeShare server. Several people (and BeShare users) have replied to the article stating that there was indeed a leak some weeks ago, but there are two important makefiles missing in order to build successfully the whole system. They also claim that new features like an updated Media Kit and new versions of Interface Kit and App_server can be found there as well as many new drivers. Our Take: If all these new features are true, it is such a shame that Be was sold out to Palm before they could make a new BeOS release out of it. Leaks are never good of course, but the OpenBeOS guys may kill for pieces of that code!

Tao Group is a well known name in the embedded systems market, but they became very popular when Amiga, Inc. licensed their products for the next generation of Amiga, AmigaDE. The Tao Development Team answers today a series of questions regarding AmigaDE, Tao's relationship with Amiga, Inc. and their technology they offer in general. They also clear up some misunderstanding that seem to exist regarding what AmigaDE really is, and they offer to our readers a number of cool screenshots of the platform.

"GTK+ is emerging as a standard for both open-source and commercial software on Linux. Soon to be released GTK+ version 2.0 provides advantages for the user and programmer as well as for people deploying the resulting applications. Users will appreciate the enhanced functionality of existing and new widgets as well as the improvements to the look and feel of the user interface. Programmers will find the powerful new widgets easier to use and more functional. Markets will grow with the ports to additional windowing systems and the enhanced internationalization." Owen Taylor writes. Read the rest of this very interesting tech article on the upcoming release of GTK 2.0. The article is available in Postscript and PDF format.

AtheOS, the promising 32-bit multithreading OS, has been given a positive three page article on the UK Linux Magazine, including the latest version of the OS on the cover CD. Scans of the article can be found here, but if you are living in UK, get to your local newsagent and grab a copy! On the whole, the article is very positive and accurate. Nice to see AtheOS getting the popularity and attention it deserves and a thank you goes to Vanders for posting the article.

Matt Dillon, not the famous actor but the kernel/VM FreeBSD hacker also well known for writting the Dice C compiler for the Amiga, is here with us today for an in-depth interview about everything regarding FreeBSD 5.0. This is the OS that all the techie people are waiting for and presenting it as the most advanced, technically-speaking, free OS of today. Additionally, we also include two mini interviews with Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD founder, and Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino from the NetBSD Core Team.