"Put all these threads together, and it appears that Apple is shifting strategy towards becoming a software company--admittedly, a software company that depends upon its own hardware. In the future, I expect to see more software from Apple, and for more of it to be sold as an upgrade to what users already own, or delivered as a paid service of some sort." Editorial and MacWorld roundup at ZDNews.

A good break down of what needs to be done for the Linux kernel 2.6 (which might be coming out as soon as in November) can be found on LWN and on KernelTrap.

Perl 5.8.0 is a major new release of the Perl 5 language. It incorporates all development and maintenance changes since the last major release, 5.6.0, including all the changes of 5.6.1.

Let's face it, the most important, truly alternative, hobby operating systems that are somewhat usable today are three: MenuetOS, SkyOS and AtheOS. All three are hobby, open source OSes, written from people who enjoy coding low level programming. Read more about the differences between these OSes and which one you might want to try out.

The Idea Basket holds an interesting interview with Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer employee and also Chairman of the IETF ZeroConf, regarding Rendezvous and more.

A new version of Mandrake Cooker, the unstable version of Mandrake, has been released on the FTP servers with many fixes and new software packages. Please note that this version is not production level quality, but it is intended for testing purposes only.

"Turbolinux, one of the four main Linux commercializers, closed down on Monday, multiple sources say. The company could not be reached for comment late last night when reports started filtering in. It was after normal business hours anywhere in the US. If true, the unconfirmed disaster will be a black eye for the newfangled United Linux initiative that Turbo, Caldera, SuSE and Conectiva, all second stringers, put together a few weeks ago to prop each other up and create a common operating system platform to take up against Linux market leader Red Hat." Read the (unconfirmed yet) report at LinuxGram.

A lot has been said about the roots of Mac OS X and there is quite some confusion about its exact Unix geneology. We asked Jordan Hubbard, engineering manager of the BSD Technologies Group at Apple and one of the most important figures throughout the FreeBSD history, about the older releases of OSX, the current one and the future ones, and this is what he replied to us: "The earliest releases were based on FreeBSD 3.2 and NetBSD, though I'm not as clear on what version of NetBSD was used. For 10.2, we did a massive re-sync with FreeBSD 4.4 and 4.5 and regard FreeBSD as the primary reference code base going forward." Update: Read for some more clarifications from Jordan. Update 2: More updates from Jordan! Read on.

"Even though the BSD/OS and NetBSD operating systems have been mostly developed by different developers with some different goals over the past nine years, they share many similarities due to their near identical open source origins and the open source software that complements the systems." Read the article at BSDNewsLetter.

There have been many articles as of late about the so called "source" distributions of Linux. Articles about "rpm hell" and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.

To understand the vision behind the Mono project and how it fits with .NET, .NET Magazine editor in chief Patrick Meader talked with Miguel de Icaza, cofounder and CTO of Ximian.

"As part of our 100th issue celebration, we present 100 of the most significant events in Linux history. As shown in the timeline, the first issue of Linux Journal coincided with the release of Linux 1.0. Ever since, the fortunes of our magazine have followed those of Linux at large." Read the Linux Timeline.

Vanders and Rick yesterday officially presented Syllable, an operating system forked from AtheOS. Version 0.4.0 is available. The system is almost identical to AtheOS, therefore all software available at Kamidake should work, with the addition of the new Desktop replacement.

OSNews is pleased to host today an exclusive interview with Waldo Bastian, the well known KDE developer and SuSE employee. Waldo has been involved pretty much in all levels in KDE's code, from Konqueror to kdelibs, to games and Kicker. Waldo speaks today about the success of KDE, its future, UnitedLinux, development and much more.