MikeOS 1.3.0 has been released, with a new Minicom-like serial terminal program, a PCX image viewer, and many updates to the system calls and documentation. MikeOS is designed to teach x86 assembly language and basic OS construction, as detailed in the Handbook.

Lennart Poettering from Red Hat who develops and maintains PulseAudio has written a detailed explanation about the underlying technical improvements in the upcoming version of PulseAudio. "A while ago I started development of special branch of PulseAudio which is called glitch-free. In a few days I will merge it back to PulseAudio trunk, and eventually release it as 0.9.11. I think it's time to explain a little what all this 'glitch-freeness' is about, what made it so tricky to implement, and why this is totally awesome technology."

No matter where I live, it always seems that I don't have good mobile phone reception. All I want is to be able to take calls that ring in on my mobile, which is my main business line, without having to stand in the corner, on tiptoes, and have to apologize to clients when they can't hear me or the call is dropped. Is that so much to ask? Hey, why don't I get those calls to ring through on my landline handset? That would be a great solution. Not so fast!

"I am very happy about the direction in which the Mac OS X GUI is going, although sadly many Mac users aren’t interested in (or don’t know about) the “lower levels” of the Macintosh Operating System. Have you ever wondered why the Terminal greets you with the words “Welcome to Darwin”? Why do BSD and Mac OS share certain bits of code? Why does Wikipedia describe Mac OS X as a graphical operating system? Today we’re going to take a look at the underlying open source technology which powers your fancy Leopard OS - the hidden core set of components, named Darwin."

Due to the success of the previous incarnation, I'd figure we do another 'OSNews Asks' item; it's a nice way to get to know each other a little more on matters that are in itself fairly irrelevant. We'll continue down the path of irrelevance by asking: What Star Trek race would you want to be, given the choice? And, of course, why? I'll start: definitely Betazoid. Reading minds, telepathy, maybe even empathic abilities, no weird ridges or other facial deformations, black eyes - what's not to like? Post your choice in the comments!

Here's an update on the Linux Driver Project. "The Linux Driver Project is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn't much hardware that Linux doesn't already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company. There are two main classes of hardware, video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions. Because of this, our main effort has turned into one of education. Educating vendors of how to become members of the Linux kernel community, proper coding standards and procedures, and how to get their code into the kernel tree."

"One of the most significant moments in the history of the modern software industry took place in 1998 when Netscape announced plans to release the source code of its browser under a license that would freely permit modification and redistribution. That pivotal event represents the point at which software freedom extended its reach beyond the enthusiast community and began its ascent into the mainstream. To celebrate the success of the past ten years and reflect on some of the challenges that the open-source software community will face in the future, we spoke to some of the pioneers who were there on day zero when revolution started. We want to share their perspectives on a wide range of issues, including software patents, the emerging challenges and opportunities created by cloud computing, open-source software on the desktop, the importance of interoperability, and the ongoing fight to bring software freedom to the masses."

DistroWatch takes a look at Dreamlinux 3.0. "Dreamlinux is still beautiful and now that the look has been recreated for a GNOME version and in the implementation of CompizFusion, it should appeal to a larger audience. It very well could be a viable alternative to Ubuntu. Overall, Dreamlinux was a fairly solid release. I had issues with the installer, wireless and suspend support, and some applications were a bit crashy. But it looks good, comes with some good application choices (except Iceweasel that I find buggy), and the Dreamlinux tools were nice. So, I have mixed feelings. I don't feel comfortable recommending it across the board. If you like the appearance, features, and software stack, then perhaps it'd best to try it on your hardware to see if it's for you."

VmwAROS started in november 2007, as a pre-installed AROS environment for VMware, but starting with the new version 0.7, published today, it has turned into a complete distribution called VmwAROS LIVE!. From now on, it will be available in two flavours: pre-installed in a virtual machine, and as a live-CD. New users will be able to boot their computers straight into a enhanced AROS environment, with DHCP network support and preliminary web browser. A complete list of new features is available at this site. VmwAROS VM beta 0.7 can be downloaded from here. VmwAROS LIVE! 0.7 can be downloaded from here.

Igor Moochnick announced Pash, an open source implementation of Microsoft's PowerShell. "The main goal is to provide a rich shell environment for other operating systems as well as to provide a hostable scripting engine for rich applications. The user experience should be seamless for people who are used to Windows version of PowerShell. The scrips, cmdlets and providers should runs AS-IS (if they are not using Windows-specific functionality). The rich applications that host PowerShell should run on any other operating system AS-IS. Secondary goal: the scripts should run across the machines and different OS’s seamlesly (but following all the security guidelines)."

From Linux Mint's About page: "Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." To reach this goal, lead developer and founder Clement Lefebvre used (surprisingly) Ubuntu as the base, and added multimedia codecs to the distribution, by default. Later on, Mint deviated more from Ubuntu by adding its own artwork, web-based package front-end, and configuration tools (MintTools) to the mix. I installed the latest stable release, Daryna (4.0), released on 15 October of last year, to see what's what.

"Reading the mainstream media this weekend, you'd believe that Bill Gates announced that Windows 7 will be released to retail in 2009. The only problem is, he didn't say anything of the sort. What Gates said merely confirmed what we've all known all along: that Windows 7 is being developed on a three-year timeframe."

"Intel's next generation laptop platform, code named Montevina, has a nice feature that remains quite unheraleded, Displayport. Not only does it allow you to drive an external DP monitor, it uses it internally." My take: So let me get this straight. We are finally leaving the days behind where TVs were TVs and computer monitors were computer monitors, entering a brave new world where a TV can be a computer monitor and vice versa, all thanks to DVI/HDMI - and now we're getting Displayport on computers, recreating the wretched OR situation of yore? If I had any hair, I'd be pulling it out right now.

Comic: "SkyOS".