The Danish Technical University (DTU) has developed Scandinavia's largest dedicated Mac cluster, consisting of 32 dedicated Power Mac G4 Dual 800 MHz workstations which is equal to 200 Gigaflop or 6 million instructions per second.

"The first release candidate of GNOME 2.0 (GNOME 2.0 RC1, also known as "Fever Pitch") was announced on June 14, 2002, and is spreading across the 'Net like wildfire. This article examines what's new in GNOME 2.0 and the release candidate, where to find it, how to install it, and concludes by discussing whether or not to install it as well as a crystal-ball look at some of the implications of GNOME's successes to date and GNOME 2.0's potential for the future." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

Bill Hayden released version 0.5.2 of his Cosmoe environment for Linux. The new version fixes a dozen of include file problems during compilation, API and source changes etc. The new version should compile now cleanly on all Linux systems, x86 and PPC. Check out the Cosmoe mailing list if you still are getting problems with compilation.

KernelTrap has interviewed kernel hacker and guru Jordan Hubbard, one of the creators of FreeBSD and currently a manager of Apple's Darwin project. With just a high school education, Jordan has offered some impressive contributions to the world of computing. In this interview, Jordan talks about his current involvement with Darwin, as well as his past efforts with FreeBSD and 386BSD. He also reflects on his recent decision to step down from the core FreeBSD team.

At USENIX 2002, the NetBSD project held an introduction of the NetBSD operating system. You can read in the slides presented about its structure, its release schedule (version 1.6 comes out in 1-2 months), its goals, its future and a lot more.

"Isn't it about time the Macintosh was simply discontinued—put down like an old dog? Why, exactly, does Apple maintain this line of machines instead of starting fresh or at least introducing something new with fresh legs. The Mac has become the AS/400 of desktop computing, except for the fact that it's prettier. Of course, if Apple never moves forward, what happens to the copycat Windows platform?" Another one of Dvorak's well-known editorials.

Our friends over at PCLinuxOnline are hosting an interview with the Lindows CEO, Michael Robertson. Nothing really new is revealed by Robertson, but an interesting read nonetheless.

XFce is an easy-to-use environment for X11 based on GTK+. There is an initial version of xfwm4, a brand-new implementation of the window manager for XFce. It is a very lightweight, fast, and fully-themeable window manager compliant with freedesktop.org standards (i.e., fully compatible with KDE 2/3 and GNOME 2). It is based on GTK+ 2.0 and uses pango for font rendering (eg. antialiased text & Unicode). Oliver Fourdan sent us two new screenshots of XFce4 (1, 2), running next to KDE3/Gnome2.

"Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to resort to significantly larger chips or even adding a second processor to the system." The story is at TheRegUS. Alan Cox says that the technology can bring up to 30% more performance than the same CPU running without Hyper-Threading, but special conditions have to be met, for example, the applications need to be programmed as multi-threaded. The right hardware for the right software.

"Sun Microsystems will announce on Wednesday a free software initiative aimed at undercutting Microsoft and other rivals in the battle over Web services software. Sun plans to give away a basic version of its application server software, a key piece of infrastructure software for building business applications. Application server software is technology that runs e-business and other Web site transactions. The giveaway targets computers that run Microsoft's Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems, Sun said." The story is at ZDNews. Our Take: Why does that reminds me Microsoft and their giveaway of IE back in the day, in order to win over Netscape? Microsoft ended up in the courts for it...

The Lycoris folks released the last beta (named "Build 45") before the final release of Lycoris Update2 next month. The first ISO is 500 MB, while the third one, which contains the dev. tools, is 160 MB.

"So far, Linux has run just fine, hasn't crashed, and seems to offer tremendous flexibility, but this comes at the price of complexity. Up to a point, Linux is as easy to use as any other mainstream operating system. But after that point is passed, the water gets very deep, very quickly--as my monitor resolution issue serves to illustrate. Windows also suffers from this "easy up to a point" issue, but the point is a good bit farther down the road than it is in Linux." The second part of David Coursey's trip to the Linux world.

"In an about-face, Microsoft said Tuesday that it will reinstate the ability to run Java programs in Windows XP. Microsoft said it would include its own Java software in the Service Pack 1 update to Windows XP due late this summer. In the long term, though, the company plans to remove Java from Windows altogether." Read the report at News.com.

A short while after the report of the appearance of Microtel PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed at Walmart.com, both Walmart.com and Lindows were claiming that LindowsOS "delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs." Today, that last phrase has gone missing and there is no more talk of running any programs designed for Windows, let alone Microsoft products. Our Take: Oh, they realised that WINE can't run all Windows apps because not all the Win32 APIs are public? Why did it take them more than one year to realise this?