The GNOME 2.0 Desktop Release Candidate 1, "Fever Pitch", is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure, and is available for immediate download. Please read the release notes for more information.

"In a move that appears to be a coup for Michael Robertson et al, Wal-Mart's online store is offering eight different Microtel PCs with LindowsOS included. The computers sell for USD$299 to $599 and ship in one to seven days." Read the story at NewsForge. Our Take: I noticed that they offer an AthlonXP system, similar to the one we tested a few days back. In order to use the X11 with its SavagePRO+ DDR graphics card, they needed to use a third party driver. The driver works, but it still has limitations.

"The outgoing president and COO of Sun Microsystems said opportunities for enterprise sales these days -- given that there are so few -- are in targeting competitors' installed bases." Read the article at AtNewYork. "Sun sets its programmers to work on setting Web services standards as part of its strategy to catch up with rivals Microsoft and IBM. Is it too late for Sun to become a niche leader?" Read the article at ZDNews.

What do you do if you don't have the source for your application and it's failing because a GNU Library for C (glibc) function is returning something bad to the application? Override the function of interest with your own version. This can be done without having root permissions and without recompiling the libc source. Imagine the thrill of writing your own version of open()! The article contains sample code.

ZDNews reports that Sun Microsystems this week released a new version of its Java software development tool with support for Web services. Sun previously released test versions of the tool and Web services technology. The Sun One Studio version 4.0, previously called Forte for Java, supports the latest version of Java and allows programmers to convert existing software into Web services.

"You will find the Cosmoe 0.5.1 tarball on the download area of www.cosmoe.com. Please read the README before building to avoid problems. This version should compile cleanly under any gcc 2.96 through 3.1. I did not test under 2.95.x" Bill Hayden announced the release to the Cosmoe mailing list. This version should also build cleanly on PPC.

"IBM DB2 is only popular on mainframes...which is only used by your father!" That was Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison's response to a report that Big Blue's database-management software is gaining market share over Oracle. A recent Gartner Dataquest study ranked IBM ahead of Oracle in the highly competitive DBMS market. The report, which Oracle has since disputed, found that the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company had slipped to second place in the overall database market in 2001, with a market share of about 32 percent, versus IBM's 34.6 percent.

nVidia Corporation, today introduced the Cg Language Specification - C for Graphics. Cg is a high level programming language that enables content developers to create cinematic-quality real-time graphics easier and faster. Developed in close collaboration with Microsoft Corporation, Cg gives developers a new level of abstraction, removing the need for them to program directly to the graphics hardware. The common, familiar C-like syntax enables rapid development of stunning, real-time shaders and visual effects for graphics platforms, and is compatible with Microsoft's recently announced High Level Shading Language for DirectX 9.0.

Just about 12 days late, FreeBSD 4.6-Release is here. Download its files, or the ISOs (only the mini-iso has been uploaded as of now), and read its release notes. Mirrors available.

C|Net News.com hosts two interesting articles about Danger, the company behind the HipTop handheld device which is a combination of wireless web-aware applications, PDA and a phone. The operating system for the device has been written from scratch (the kernel is the work of a team of ex-Be engineers, including Travis Geiselbrecht, who also brought us NewOS) while it also runs a Java VM. First article can be found here, and interview with Danger's Rubin and Britt is here.

Late last week in an online article The OmniGroup president, William Shipley (makers of OmniWeb for MacOSX) opined that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) would eventually stop development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh.

Yamit is a microkernel, developed under a BSD compatible license. Mentioned capabilities are a thread-aware kernel and multiprocessor support (including both tight SMP and loose - NUMA architectures). The project is largely based on the Mach microkernel that was being designed for many years by CMU and OSF.

The third release candidate for Slackware 8.1 has been released. Changelog here.

Axel, Bruno and the rest of the company in the OpenBFS team, have completed the development of OpenBFS, the open source equivelant of Be's popular 64-bit journaling file system. OpenBFS currently runs on BeOS 5, awaiting the further evolution of the OpenBeOS/NewOS kernel in order to start a back port. The team reports that while the filesystem clone is not very well tested yet, it is already seems pretty stable and it beats in performance the original BFS.