"If these OS's were cars, XP would be the Warner Brothers Special Edition minivan, and 7.2 would be a Yugo well on its way to becoming a KIA. Damn." This is a... pretty funny article regarding the experience of a TheRegister journalist, trying to compare both RedHat and WindowsXP. Our take: AFAIK, all he had to do was to decrease the PIO mode value of his CD-ROM in his computer's BIOS. After doing that, the Linux installation should have worked just fine.

Following up on last week's interesting interview with REBOL's own Carl Sassenrath, Rebol Technologies announced today that StreamCast, makers of Morpheus and next generation peer-to-peer content distribution networks, will base Morpheus 2.0 on REBOL's X Internet operating system (IOS) technology to provide interactive programmable content to more than 30 million users by the end of the year.

The well known to 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' fans, Wil Wheaton (the 'Wesley Crusher' actor) is being interviewed by Slashdot. Wil talks about TNG, his relationship with computers and the Free Software, his work at NewTek (makers of the 'Lightwave' 3D application) and the legendary "Shut up Wesley!". Great to see an actor turned to a computer geek rather a geek (or singer/model/housewife/fisherman) turned into an actor!

WINE is definetely not an emulator. Neither a runtime. Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix featuring a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes (some screenshots here). Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% open source Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. WINE's project leader and CodeWeavers' software engineer (a company which sells a modified WINE version), Alexandre Julliard, answers a series of questions to OSNews regarding the project and its future.

Plural OS is a multitasking, microkernel operating system being developed based on the XOpen Single Unix Specifications. The project only started a month ago. Another hobby OS, Clicker, a multitasking open-source operating system project, is based on a modular microkernel and a brand-new architecture. With its new release today, Clicker made a leap, the OS was able to run its first binary application.

With the release of WindowsXP, the well-known technical web site have published three articles: "Price, Performance, Pitfalls": Which edition? How fast? How compatible? Answers from the Labs. "The First Few Weeks": Much to like, but room for improvement. "It's Finally Here": A collection of news, reviews and XPlanations from around Ziff Davis. We should also not forget the very interesting --technically-- article they featured some months ago, regarding kernel enhancements to be found in WindowsXP's kernel.

The calling card for the Linux-Mandrake distribution has always been ease of installation and use, and 8.1 delivers the goods in this department. First time users will find many of the pains of installation are handled automatically by the installation program. Experienced Linux users will appreciate a multitude of installation modes and options. Read the rest of the review at Linux.com.

PC Magazine offers a six-way shootout between Red Hat, SuSE, Debian (Potato), Caldera, Mandrake, and Turbo Linux. Red Hat takes top honors in the final reckoning (which can be viewed by downloading a PDF on the last page of the report.) From the article: "Widespread industry acceptance and ease of use make Red Hat's distro a solid choice for general use, but don't rule out other distributions until you've studied them and know which excel at specific tasks."

Kerneltrap interview's Keith Owens this week, an experienced kernel hacker who has long contributed to the Linux kernel. His contributions include updating ksymoops and modutils, both of which he maintains. He also works on kbuild 2.5. Earlier, he built the original Integrated Kernel Debugging patch. He's also working on kdb and XFS.

It's only been out for a day, but Windows XP already needs 20MB of updates, according to C|Net-News. Some of the updates fix security holes, others resolve glitches and a few add new features. This upgrade also purports to sort out problems with Pagemaker, Dreamweaver, McAfee VirusScan, Money 2000 and RealPlayer 7.0 among many others.

"With all of this going for it, how come Linux has not exploded even more than it has? How come it has not penetrated corporations to a larger degree? How come users have been so resistant to it on the desktop / client level? There are any number of possible reasons, and to be honest, I'm not expert enough to be able to nail them all down with absolute certainty. But I, like so many of you, am a huge supporter of the platform and a rabid enthusiast who spends countless hours tweaking and tinkering with various distributions. It is a synergy of sorts. I learn about the complexities while working to customize the system, and as an old DOS guy from way back, it is actually pretty fun." AnandTech's Paul Sullivan is analyzing the Linux situation in his latest editorial.

A few days ago we hosted an interview with the OpenBeOS team leader but I received a number of emails asking us for more information regarding the other effort to 'save' BeOS, BlueOS. BlueOS uses Linux kernel 2.4.12 as its basis, and Xfree. For now, they are building a BeOS look-alike Interface Kit and the app_server on top of XFree, so it is not just a simple window manager, but a whole new API and environment. In future versions, the BlueOS team will completely bypass XFree and have a stand alone BeOS compatible app_server which will only use some of the XFree's system calls to be able to use its 2D/3D drivers. But let's read what the French coder Guillaume Mailard has to say about the project. Guillaume also sent us a screenshot which shows the custom BeOS-alike GUI the team have already coded the last few months, currently running under BeOS (and this is why they have shared that code with the OpenBeOS team) and it is currently ported to Linux.

"Judging a book by its cover alone would mean that AMD's Hammer architecture would be used in the first 64-bit x86 microprocessors. We already know that Intel has taken a route away from x86 for their 64-bit solution, Itanium which uses a new instruction set architecture (ISA) called EPIC. The point of this article is to not only examine the pros and cons of AMD's extension of the 32-bit x86 ISA but also the rest of the story when it comes to Hammer since there is a lot more to this architecture than a few more registers and greater memory addressability." Anandtech explains it all for you.

"Down at the bottom of Bill Gates' keynote to the Professional Developers Conference yesterday lies confirmation that the wheels have come off the Windows rollout wagon." TheRegister reports. Windows Longhorn is scheduled for release in 2003, while Blackcomb, which will be the real .NET OS, is scheduled for sometime due to 2005. WindowsXP is not far away though, as the official retail release is due tomorrow.