This week, KernelTrap spoke with Neal Walfield of the GNU/Hurd development team. From their project FAQ, "'Hurd', as an acronym, stands for `Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons'. Hird, in turn, stands for `Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth'. The Hurd is a radical departure from UNIX. A unique and interesting approach to solving many of the problems found in current operating systems. While it's not yet production grade, it's evolved enough to be quite usable.

"Alan Cox is not only a long-time Linux kernel contributor and maintainer, he also isn't afraid to make waves once in awhile. While Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds usually stays above the fray of the politics of Open Source and related topics, the U.K.-based Cox, sometimes referred to as Torvalds' second in command, isn't afraid to weigh in on several topics, including his opposition to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Read the interesting interview at NewsForge.

Covalent Technologies will release its long-awaited version 2.0 of the Apache Web server software Monday--ahead of software from the larger Apache project itself. Apache 2.0 initially was expected by the end of 2000 but only entered beta testing in April 2001. Covalent decided version 2.0 was ready for prime time, said Jim Zemlin, vice president of marketing.

"Microsoft will make its first move into the cutthroat business with the Xbox on Nov. 15. Three days later, Nintendo plans to start U.S. sales of the GameCube, its first new console since the 1996 launch of the Nintendo 64. Meanwhile, market leader Sony has built a strong bunker against the interlopers, having shipped more than 20 million PlayStation 2 machines since its debut last year." Never in the history of the $20 billion video-game industry have two home consoles made their debuts in the same week. It's shaping up to be a battle royal between Microsoft and Nintendo.

Gdkxft transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+ 1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (or, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your applications. The latest version of Gdkxft, version 1.3, adds AA support for Mozilla.

Another excellent series of articles at ExtremeTech. This time, they are discussing the Bus technologies of the future. "It's almost counterintuitive, but serial buses are blowing away parallel buses in the PC. We tell you why and take you beyond the hype."

After earlier announcing plans to create a subsidiary for its operating system, Palm on Thursday said it is looking to divide itself into separate, publicly traded companies. "We are looking to move into external separation next year," acting CEO Eric Benhamou told CNET News.com on Thursday, shortly after the company announced that Carl Yankowski was resigning as Palm's chief executive. The company is also looking into asking David Nagel to become the Palm CEO, while he was originally hired to be the CEO of the new Palm subsidiary -- the OS division -- where the Be engineers and Be's COO Steve Sakoman would be employeed, after the buyout of Be's IP would complete. There is a fair amount of uncertainty in the Palm land, as revenue fell a lot recently and the new PocketPC is a rival that the aged PalmOS can't compete with anymore.

"Just about every software maker has embraced "Web services" as its new mantra in the past year, claiming that the trend will revolutionize business and the use of the Internet. Although it was initially met with skepticism, the idea has gained credibility with the support of such industry leaders as Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The stakes are particularly high for the software industry, which is trying to revitalize sales in a punishing economy. But before the concept can take off, companies face an uphill battle in convincing customers that they need Web services--and in explaining what they are." Read the rest of the 4-part feature article at News.com.

Peter Tattam from Trumpet Software and also the creator of PetrOS wrote in to tell us that " we are exploring the possibility of providing a BeOS layer to PetrOS. This is consistent with our philosophy of providing multiple API support in the OS. I am in discussions with the OpenBeOS group to determine the feasibility of getting OpenBeOS to run in PetrOS. This would involve us writing a BeOS compatible kernel driver, and supporting ELF format executables in addition to the current PE format executables.We will continue our development on the Win32 layer at the same time with a goal of being able to seamlessly run BeOS and Win32 applications on the same desktop." OSNews recently hosted an interview with Peter regarding PetrOS.

"My fellow cheapskates, I feel for you. Really, I do. I know you want to upgrade to OS X but are racked with doubt. Is Apple's stunning new operating system really worth its $130 price tag? After all, that's enough to buy more than 10 different shareware versions of solitaire or keep yourself in beer and pizza for month." Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek.

Given its size, when IBM talks about Linux, people listen. Two years after IBM laid out its Linux strategy, the company seems to have met its goals and then some. Joe Barr talks to IBM's Linux czar to find what's ahead for the computer giant and open source.

Tom's Hardware has setuped a match between the two most powerful 3D graphics card models, the ATi Radeon 8500 and the nVidia GeForce3 Ti500. To cut the (long) story short, ATi shows that it has a much more impressive hardware than nVidia has, but also much (also impressively) worse drivers. So, while it takes a small lead to only some tests under Win98, under WindowsXP, the ATi card completely fails to perform adequately, plus the drivers are unstable and even exiting or crashing randomly some of Tom's tests.

"Linux penguins are braying louder, but companies don't plan to adopt many of them in the near future. Almost every large company has at least thought about Linux, and some of them are running pilot projects or even day-to-day (albeit nonessential) systems on the open-source operating system. And because the economy is still weak, many tech observers believe that Linux--and its price tag of "free"--will attract more businesses looking to cut costs. At least that's the theory. Practice indicates something else." Read the rest of the editorial at ZDNews.

OpenSSH 3.0 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at OpenSSH web site. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.