"Even for self-styled Mac pros, the introduction of the consumer-friendly iMac remains a watershed event in the history of Apple. Between its striking industrial design and appealing specs, the entry-level desktop system proved that master marketer Steve Jobs was truly back in Apple's saddle: The all-in-one system's distinctive aura of one-button consumer cool recalled the earliest Mac models, but its sub-$1,500 price point appealed to a far wider audience than those $3,000, mid-'80s trailblazers." Read the rest of the analysis at ExtremeTech.

You may or may not have heard about Lindows already. Lindows (the company) is a new Linux start-up, launched earlier this year by former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson. The promise of Lindows (the Operating System) is to be an affordable alternative (Operating System) to Microsoft Windows. And, as an extra boon, this alternative to Windows (which promises to run all your Windows applications), will run Linux applications as well.

Kerneltrap interviewed Dave Jones who currently lives in London, employed by SuSE as a Linux kernel hacker. In the past six months since he graduated from the University of Glamorgan he has gotten involved in an impressive range of kernel related projects, including Powertweak, x86info, OProfile and the Kernel Janitors Project. Additionally, he maintains a -dj patch for the 2.5 development kernel, helping to sync it with the stable 2.4 kernel as well as offering increased stability.

In the year 2000, some pundits suggested the growing enthusiasm about open source was destined to give out. Once economic conditions returned to pre-dot-com levels, they reasoned, open source would be seen as a fad, just like the pet rock. The editorial at InfoWorld concludes that "the hype surrounding open source did not survive the year. But open source itself not only survived, it began to thrive in the business world."

There were an amazing number of people (around 300,000) who visited OSNews recently to read Scot Hacker's article on MacOSX. As part of the camp of BeOS refugees, I have been searching for some time for a suitable replacement. Many come close - FreeBSD is fantastic, but still complicated, the new school of Linuxes are very close to ready for me, even Windows XP has come a long way. My x86 machine is pretty fun - it gets a new OS every two weeks or so. But what does that say - that I like variety or that I can't find what I want? I'd suggest most of us still feel that we're missing something - otherwise, why read osnews.com?

There is a new version for the unstable build of mySQL 4.01, WindowMaker 0.80 (with some nice new features), GCC 3.03, while KDE released version 2.2.2 for FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

Just in time for Christmas, one of the well known AtheOS developers, Kristian Van Der Vliet ('Vanders'), released as a Christmas gift to the AtheOS community the first full scale native AtheOS application, the email client Mercury. We normally do not post on such application releases, but this app is indeed a major step for AtheOS. From Vanders and all of us here at OSNews, Merry Christmas to all !

The SkyOS developers are working on brining lots of new features in the new version 3.6 as you can see here. A new screenshot can be seen here as well. MenuetOS is prepared to release version 0.63 which enables the MTRRs for the Intel LFBs resulting to a much faster GUI. Also, a newer version of FreeVMS was released recently.

The founder of the Python programming language, Guido van Rossum, writes: "On December 21, just in time to be placed under the Christmas tree, we're issuing the final release of Python 2.2. We're proud of this release, and expect that you'll like it". Read what's new in the new version and other related information.

From the announcement: "The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has secured a license from Sun Microsystems to distribute a native FreeBSD version of both the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Thanks to the great efforts of the FreeBSD Java team, these should be available for inclusion with the upcoming release of FreeBSD 4.5 in January, 2002. The general availability of a distributable version of Java will benefit end users, commercial users, and developers who use FreeBSD. Java continues to grow in popularity and has become heavily used in server side web applications, one of FreeBSD's core areas of strength. With an officially licensed binary Java distribution, FreeBSD becomes an ideal platform for execution, development, and deployment of Java based solutions."

This milestone version, features basic S/MIME support, 'favicon' support and the Document Inspector, a tool to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. Download from mozilla.org.

The source code for ID Software's Quake 2 is now available for download, and is also released under the GPL license. The .plan file for John Carmack has the details. If you know working mirrors for the downloaded archive, please post about it on the comments section of this story.

Caldera announced it has made Suites VII and IX of the AIM Benchmark available under the GPL. The AIM Benchmark Suites - "AIM Multiuser Benchmark" and the "Independent Resource Benchmark" - are expected to be available shortly as a SourceForge project. They are currently available via FTP from Caldera's site. The AIM Benchmark technology has proved useful for more than a decade in measuring performance of hardware and versions of the UNIX operating system. The benchmarks have been licensed by nearly all of the vendors of UNIX system hardware. In all, more than 70 companies have used these benchmarks to compare and tune products. In addition, because of the stressful multi-dimensional nature of the AIM Benchmark workload, many OS and hardware vendors have used the benchmarks as part of their quality assurance process.

Macslash.com reports that according to the Software Update readme, the 30.3 MB MacOSX upgrade brings the following: "The 10.1.2 update delivers improvements and new functionality, as well as expanded peripheral support for Mac OS X. Enhancements include: Updated and new USB and FireWire device support, including FireWire-based digital cameras, PC Card storage devices, including media readers, IrDA modem support for FireWire-based PowerBook models, Audio, Display, and Speech improvements, Networking and Printing improvements, AirPort v2.0, Apache web server v1.3.22, AppleScript v1.8". Update: Of the version that potentially will become 10.2 or 10.5, leaked screenshots have been released on the web.