More thumbnails and fullsize images of the new Control Panel are up under the Sneak Peek section. Have look at this great addition to Lycoris Desktop/LX before you get the new version coming out on June 17th. Our Take: Lycoris is shaping up as indeed a great desktop system! Only problem I got with these screenshots is that either Freetype or the particular font used is not up to par. The font rendering quality is truly bad, and I have noticed such problems only under Lycoris.

Last year, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik thought Sun Microsystems' open source-based alternative to Microsoft's widely used Office software would encourage broader use of the Linux operating system on desktops and perhaps loosen the iron grip of Windows. But Szulik abandoned those hopes when Sun started charging for its StarOffice product and changed its way of dealing with the original equipment manufacturers, such as Red Hat, which can bundle it with their own offerings. Szulik accused Sun of adopting the domineering methods of mutual enemy Microsoft.

Giving off an impression as the Swiss Army knife of Linux books, "MultiTool Linux" by Schwarz, Anderson, Curtis, Murphy and published by Addison-Wesley, this book tries to solve very specific problems with Linux. Let's see whether it succeeds to do so or not.

From ActiveWin: "Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 users can now access the brand new and convenient Windows Update version 4 website after they download an update on the actual Windows Update website. Windows Automatic Updating feature notifies you when critical updates are available for your computer. This feature replaces Critical Update Notification if it is already installed. Critical Update Notification will no longer offer critical updates."

Solaris 8 - Administrator's Guide is a book written by Paul Watters, and published by O'Reilly. The book is all about how to create and administer networks using Solaris 8. The book, published in January, is current even for Solaris 9, mostly because not many changes to the way Solaris works have been made in the new version of the OS.

LinuxJournal looks at Qt 3.0 and talks about why it's such a strong and useful visual design environment. Only two serious choices for a GUI toolkit are left: Qt and GTK. When Qt 3.0 was released in October 2001, it was a singificant upgrade and was well received. The most important features of Qt 3.0 are the extensions of the utility libraries, the addition of a rich text edit widget, fabulous support for international fonts and a vastly improved Qt Designer.

SkyOS now has a new beta web site, while Robert Szeleney updates SkyOS with many fixes for the TCP/IP stack, the VESA driver and the FAT mounting procedure and with some changes in the API. The new SkyOS version is expected soon. In other hobby-OS news, a new test version of MenuetOS 0.68 is out, while a new screenshot is showing the new window manager, borrowed by Gnome's CRUX theme.

A new virus called Simile.D may not be much of a threat to computer systems, but some of its technical tricks could lead to a rethinking of the principles underlying antivirus software. Read the story at C|Net.

Apple Computer has kept itself busy of late creating new recipes for marketing and sales. The company recently cooked up a public preview of QuickTime 6. To get a taste of Apple's future, CNET News.com sits down with Steve Jobs and bites into the issues. The interview is about the MPEG-4 issues, the iMac, while you will also find an article about eMac, now being sold to everyone, and not just to educational institutes and students.

Yes, it is here! After years of waiting, many developer releases and many betas, Mozilla 1.0 has finally been released. Everyone give it a try! Unfortunately, most of the mirrors do not seem to carry the final 1.0 version yet, and the main server seems already loaded.

After many months of waiting, QNX RtP (now called QNX Momentics) 6.2 is released. The new version has many fixes, new features and more device driver support. It requires a PIII-650 or better (however, I have successfully ran its beta on a 233 Mhz PC with 64 MB RAM a few months ago), 128MB RAM and 1 GB disk space. QNX Momentics' primary target are embedded developers instead of end users. Please note that QNX 6.2 does not support anymore the FAT32-installed QNX boot image, but instead, it requires its own partition. The ISO available for download is 195 MB. You can read our world exclusive preview of QNX 6.2 we published last January, here.

A new MacOSX update was just released. Update 10.1.5 delivers enhancements which improve the reliability of MacOSX applications, delivers improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support. Specific improvements include:

Openwave Systems Inc., the worldwide leader of open IP-based communication infrastructure software and applications, announced that it has contributed its Open Usability Interface server-side programming library and source code to the open source developer community under a Mozilla License. Openwave is contributing Open Usability Interface as a code base for developers for developing mobile applications that can be accessed through multiple networks and mobile devices. Open Usability Interface is a server-side programming library that that abstracts the presentation of content from the underlying platform implementation details. In practice, developers code to the capabilities that each platform offers. The library presents the best possible user experience by adapting the application user-interface for the particular device and gateway requesting the service.

"Recently, a number of new Linux distributions have been seeking to create a Windows clone. Some of these are highly commercial projects and have arguably began taking on some of the code sharing traits of their model, while most simply seek to make a Windows-like system for new converts to use while they get accustomed to the entire Linux/Open Source world. A couple of these projects stand out because of their close similarities to the system they're trying to copy. Others stand out not only because of that, but also because of the innovative features they add. Everyone's Linux, or ELX, is in that second category." Read the review at NewsForge. On a similar note, Lindows has released their third closed beta, Xandros their second one, while Lycoris is heading for public release of their Update2 version on June 17th.