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.

"Attorneys for the states seeking tough penalties for Microsoft Corp.'s antitrust actions have backed off of a demand for a modular version of the Windows operating system, saying information sharing is more important than dismantling the Redmond, Wash., software maker's flagship product." Read it at eWeek.

"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...

Slackware 8.1 has been released and is available for download. An installation ISO image can be found here.You can pre-order the Slackware 8.1 official 4 CD-ROM set at Slackware's store. Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the Mozilla 1.0 browser, kernel 2.4.18, support for filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Mirrors available.

"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.

Dave Hansen, the IBM programmer working at the Linux kernel, answers back to some interesting questions about Linux, development and its desktop status, at an interview over at Slashdot.

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?

"With more and more hosts being connected to the Internet, the importance of securing connected networks has increased, too. One mechanism to provide enhanced security for a network is to filter out potentially malicious network packets. Firewalls are designed to provide ``policy-based'' network filtering." Read the paper at Benzedrine.

"Industry sources close to Microsoft's plans say that certain OEMs will be proved with service pack one as early as the end of this month. System integrators have wanted Microsoft to introduce the service pack for some time. At a system builder conference in Monaco earlier this year, Microsoft was suggesting that it could arrive in September." Read the report at TheInquirer.

"Two Singapore programmers claim to have created an operating system that can run programs written for different platforms such as Windows and Linux. Called MXI (Motion Experience Interface), the new operating system will allow handhelds to run any desktop program, said R. Chandrasekar and Sam Hon Kong Lum, the 22-year-old co-inventors." Read the report at ZDNews.

"PC repair guru Scott Mueller tells you what your computer's BIOS chip is and what it does. Then he teaches you how to know if you need an upgrade, and how to do it." Read the article at InformIT. Free registration required.

Found this interesting link regarding NetBSD's kernel scheduler over at BSDForums: "This paper presents the design and implementation of a two-level thread scheduling system on NetBSD. This system provides a foundation for efficient and flexible threads on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines. The work is based on the scheduler activations kernel interface proposed by Anderson et al. for user-level control of parallelism in the presence of multiprogramming and multiprocessing."