Galeon 1.0, the browser that utilizes the Mozilla engine but in a lightweight fashion, was released recently and the LinuxLaboratory feature a quick review of the application. In related news, Opera Software announced the Opera 6 TechPreview version for Linux.

The Unununium-based distribution FRuSTRaTiON, version 0.3, has just been released. Features improved console support, new keyboard code with unicode support, ext2 file system support; and it can now run applications. Unununium is a Single-Addressing-Space environement entirely developed in 386+ assembly with an emphasis on speed. The system is entirely dynamic: Any component of the system may be reloaded at any time; there is not even a static nano-kernel. Channeled IRQ, dynamic linker, memory allocation, 3d engine and communication channels are only a few of the elements present in the system. Multiple virtual consoles support, fixing the thread engine and starting the development of a GUI are their current development priorities.

In KernelTrap, Jeremy Andrews interviews Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD's creator and maintainer. OpenBSD is widely hailed as being the most secure OS available. The latest version, OpenBSD 3.0, is slated for official release on December 1, 2001.

"GNOME is not an independent software project; it is a part of the GNU system. This means GNOME does not exist just for its own success. It has a purpose: to provide the GNU system with a desktop. So while we should try to make GNOME successful (all else being equal), that's not the highest goal of the work on GNOME. If, on the other hand, GNOME and the rest of the GNU system are widely used, but mainly in combination with proprietary software, they will have succeeded only part-way, and a big task will remain ahead of us." Read the rest of the answers, and also have a read to the issue that was raised a month ago between RMS and some of the GNOME members.

Emanuele from the Mantova Unix User Group in Italy had a chance to speak to Travis Geiselbrecht, the NewOS creator. Travis has worked at Be's kernel team and he is now employed by Danger Research, while in his free time he is helping the Open BeOS developers to integrate his NewOS kernel into the OpenBeOS one. Travis is talking about his the future of NewOS, Posix and he is giving his opinion about BeOS and its future. Descriptive quote: "It's pretty obvious to me that Palm is buying the engineering team of Be and I see absolutely no point in Palm releasing R6."

Interactive Studio has published the QubeOS web site which serves as the developer's web site for Qube application developers. You can also download there the Windows, DOS, and Linux compatible Qube environment and the Windows Qube SDK. An interesting article found on QubeOS web site is about the Object Routing technology, a technology which Michal Stencl has been developing for Qube. OSNews featured an interview with Michal recently. Our Take: A port to FreeBSD would also be desirable.

Linux kernel version 2.4.15 has been released and it is available from Kernel.org and its mirrors. Patch here, Changelog here, while the development, unstable, 2.5 source tree opened by Linus Torvalds. Update: A serious bug has been discovered on both 2.4.15 & 2.5 kernels and it can corrupt your filesystem. Please use an older version of the kernel until 2.4.16 comes out. Update 2: Linux kernel 2.4.16 has been released. Patch here, source here.

"Phil Schiller, Apple's VP of worldwide marketing, has gone on the record to suggest March as the date when new Macs ship with OS X as default. Macs have shipped with both the old and the new operating systems preloaded since May, but with OS 9.x as default, and Apple has been pretty cagey so far on even suggesting a date for the big switch." TheRegister reports.

KDE 2.2.2 has just been released. New features include the QuickTime plugin, wheelmouse support for PDF viewer, icon loading optimized, file dialog speedups and more.

Norwegian ex-Amiga coder Kurt Skauen started designing & writing AtheOS in 1996. Until late 1999, AtheOS (a name derived from the Greek Goddess Athena) used to be called AltOS. AtheOS has even seen complete rewrites along the years, and today is on version 0.3.7. Come with me and see what AtheOS has to offer today to you. All your questions answered and we also include five new screenshots.

Slashdot reported that "3DLabs has posted a series of white papers on OpenGL 2.0 covering topics such as improving parallelism, timing control, minimizing data movement programmable pixel pack and unpack and (most notably) a proposal for a hardware independent shading language."

Mozilla.org made available for download binaries of the Mozilla 0.9.6 Milestone. New to this milestone are fixes for about 1,600 bugs including: Mozilla now displays page icons in the url bar (Expect support for shortcut icons (aka favicon) in Mozilla 0.9.7). Mozilla can now display Windows .BMP and .ICO images on all platforms. Print Preview has been implemented. Macintosh Page Setup has been implemented. Mail message "labels" support has been implemented. Mail "prefill mail filter" support has been implemented. The new Search for item on the context menu lets you search for any text you highlight on a web page. In related news, Netscpape 6.2 and also Netscape 4.79 (based on the old 4.x codebase) were released very recently.

Last month Progeny Linux Systems ceased development on their own distribution in order to focus on selling professional services. In their announcement, the company cited the prohibitive cost of developing and publishing a distro. This move marked another firm in the wave of tech companies, Linux and otherwise, making significant changes to adjust to the market slump. Progeny's distribution was based on Debian GNU/Linux, and many in the Linux community were closely watching the company because it was founded by Debian creator Ian Murdock. OSNews spoke to the President of Progeny Linux Systems, Steve Schafer, once the dust had settled on his company's announcement.

"The revolution triggered by Linux may be slowly starting to fade. Many companies are becoming increasingly protective of their intellectual property rather than embracing open source during the economic slump. The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump." Reported at ZDNews.