Pat Volkerding has announced the release of the Slackware 8.1 RC-2. The changelog has more details.

"Except for the most recent kernels, Linux will only see 137 GB out of the 156 GB on the the Maxtor "160 Gigabyte" Diamondmax 540T drives. I found nothing on the Maxtor or RedHat web sites about this, but a search of the Linux Kernel mailing list produced a number of references to a patch which was purported to work by some people." Read the article at NBer.org.

"Both Microsoft and AMD have taken the unusual step of re-affirming their collaboration on 64-bit computing. The companies issued a joint press release in Taiwan today claiming that future Microsoft Windows operating systems and AMD's K8 family, formerly codenamed Hammer, would be developed closely together." Read the report at the Inquirer.

Bill Hayden, the initiator of the Cosmoe project has released a developer version. Bill is looking for feedback, bug reports and even code contributions. You will need a 2.4.x Linux kernel, RPM and a framebuffer graphics driver loaded through LILO. At this point, Cosmoe should only run via the console, as root. A mirror and an additional screenshot can be found here. Recently, OSNews featured an interview with Bill.

"Solaris 9 for Intel could be poised to ship after all, Register spies at Sun suggest. The official line is currently that Sun is shipping Solaris 9 for Sparc, but that "Sun is deferring the productization and release of the Solaris 9 OE for Intel IA-32." In English this means that Sun has (probably) more or less finished it but is hesitating as to whether or not to ship it, while in ITspeak this sort of phrasing generally means that the product is headed for a lingering death in the netherworld." The story is at TheRegister.

Check out this new operating system, called JTMOS. Currently under heavy development, however, it already features a GUI.

"After a long break between releases, Microsoft on Tuesday issued the Windows 2000 SP3 Release Candidate, marked build 3.140. The long awaited update weighs in at 17MB and 30MB for Professional and Server versions of the operating system, respectively." Read the report at BetaNews.

"A number of Linux vendors will announce on Thursday that they have agreed to standardize on a single Linux distribution to try to take on Red Hat Inc.'s dominance in the industry. A media advisory issued on Tuesday said executives from Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux on Thursday will make 'a major announcement that will change the shape of Linux worldwide.'" Read more at eWeek.

"The most tantalising net rumour burning up the wires this week is the one about the Apple iBrowser. Heard it? It goes like this. Apple co-opts the Mozilla code base for a skunkworks native OS X browser that's both super fast and grannie-friendly. A Galeon for OS X. "iBrowser" thus completes the set of consumer software apps gradually introduced with iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie, which are being advertised under the slogan 'everything's easier on a Mac'." Read the article at TheRegister. In other browser news, Opera 6.03 for Windows and Opera 6.01 for Linux were released today.

"Support for Bluetooth has been added to the Linux development kernel, a step toward native Bluetooth support in upcoming releases of the Linux operating system." Read the report at ZDNews.

I keep reading review after review after review of the current crop of linux distributions. And everytime I'm annoyed at the end. I'm not annoyed by the style, or the comments, but more at the way they always end far too soon? One of the latest reviews of Lycoris is a prime example. What is this a review of? It's a review of the installation, and a quick insight into some of the packages found. To compare, it's like reviewing the opening cinematic sequence of game. You need to review the way the game plays as well! And people need to start reviewing how the distributions function over a period of time greater than a day or two. So here's my Mandrake 8.x experience.

There's a new personal e-zine, The Idea Basket, that's debuting today with an editorial on the commercial feasibility of a next-generation user interface. The editorial talks about the state of current user interfaces, software such as Apple's iPhoto that is pushing the envelope of interface design, reasons why there has recently been such a lack of innovation and research in the field of interface design, and some ideas that both consumers and developers can employ to help bring computer software to the next level of usability.

"The first release candidate for Slackware 8.1 is now available on ftp.slackware.com (and hopefully some mirrors by now). Recent additions to -current include Mozilla-1.0rc3, KDE-3.0.1, and gcc-3.1. This is all leading up to what we're hoping will be the best Slackware release ever!" Changelog, mirrors.

Jason Lam has submitted a step by step guide (PDF format) to securing MySQL on FreeBSD, which he recently wrote for FreeBSD 4.5, to fulfill his SANS GCUX certification. The original submission can be found at BSDForums.org.