"Recently there's been a lot of news about OpenSolaris, more specifically in reference to the great progress made by virtualization technologies in it. In this article, I will examine some of these technologies, and compare them with the state of the art on other platforms."

Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site (release announcement), and on the network of public mirror servers. 2008 includes all the latest software and enhancements over previous Mandriva releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, a 3D-accelerated desktop (Compiz Fusion and Metisse), Firefox 2.0.0.6, and much more. You can read about the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The release notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

"Guest columnist Howard Fosdick has previously used Puppy Linux to successfully revive 'mature' PCs. Now, he takes a broader, deeper look at the parsimonious distribution and its potential value on normal desktop PCs, covering its features, flexibility, capability to peacefully coexist with Windows, ease of use, and limitations."

"Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it."

"ROX is one of the genuinely interesting file managers available for the major platforms - GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows (under Cygwin). As can be inferred from the manager’s website, ROX-Filer is a project aimed to move the best features of RISC OS onto Linux and Unix platforms. Its small footprint and configurability are its unquestionable hallmarks."

"NetBSD has been involved in the Google Summer of Code since its conception in 2005. This year we were glad to once again have the oppertunity to introduce a number of students to our operating system, to Open Source software development and get them sponsored by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers. The students working on this year's projects were mentored by various NetBSD developers with extensive experience in the respective work areas."

PCMag takes a look at the Vista SP1 beta, and concludes: "The actual first beta of SP1 may not deserve a fanfare, simply because - like all first betas - it has its own set of issues to resolve. But by the time you can get SP1 on the Microsoft Update site or as part of a new Vista installation DVD, you'll want your PC to have it. Nothing dramatic here, but SP1 is a solid, useful upgrade that makes the operating system a little safer and a little faster."

A review of OpenSUSE 10.3, which concludes: "While openSUSE's efforts to simplify Linux or Window-fy Linux can be commended, the inconsistency in their implementation is its downfall. Opening applications quickly becomes a chore with the excessive amount of clicks needed to find the application you want. The application browser loads slowly, looks cluttered, and uses icons that are too large. Yast has been improved but still feels slow."

When it comes to launching online attacks, criminals are getting more organised and branching out from the Windows operating system, says eBay's security chief. eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation, and while the company is not releasing the results of this analysis, it did uncover a huge number of hacked, botnet computers, said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University. "The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," he said.

Developers have received from Apple a 'ZFS on Mac OS X Preview 1.1' package, which offers preliminary support for the ZFS file system, originally developed by Sun Microsystems for their Solaris OS. Currently, the Mac OS is based on the HFS+ file system, but leaked screenshots of earlier versions of Leopard showed options for formatting hard drives for ZFS. Reportedly, this preview allows full read and write capabilities with the latest developer build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple's upcoming version of its OS X operating system.

KDE developer Pinheiro revealed his ideas on the next KDE menu, dubbed 'Raptor'. "What is Raptor? Raptor is a an amazing project I have been working on in the last few days. It tries to be a fresh new way of finding your desktop applications, and interacting with its users." A design document (containing more screenshots) is also available .

The first officially-released build of Windows XP SP3 has surfaced, with 1073 patches/hotfixes and several new features. This build has been made available to testers as a part of the Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 beta program and is available in English, German, and Japanese.

"MonaOS is a free operating system. It's new, small, simple, open source and well structured. So, MonaOS may be suitable for education of operating system and program at school." It's a microkernel-based operating system, MIT-licensed, and available for IA-32.

"A lot of bandwidth has been wasted arguing over the lack of usability in open-source software/free software. Some people say that bad usability is endemic to the entire OSS world, while others say that OSS usability is great but that the real problem is the closed-minded users who expect every program to clone Microsoft. Some people contend that UI problems are temporary growing pains, while others say that the OSS development model systematically produces bad UI. In an effort to understand usability in the OSS world, I've researched the stories behind my favorite - and least favorite - OSS programs. I've found a fascinating variety of personalities, design philosophies, and project organizations. Although I've only scratched the surface, there are already themes that come up again and again."