Opera Mini 4.0-beta was released today and this seems to be one of the best surprises of the year. It has Javascript, CSS support and zoom-in support similar to the iPhone's, but with all the processing happening to another server instead of your cellphone. Read more for screenshots and info!

Mandriva has made a formal statement of its position regarding the recent Microsoft deals by other Linux vendors. "Up to now, there has been absolutely no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagators that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents. So we think that, as in any democracy, people are innocent unless proven guilty and we can continue working in good faith. So we don't believe it is necessary for us to get protection from MS to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone."

"Last week the first open-source ATI R500 driver had entered the world. This new driver (named the xf86-video-avivo) is very early into development, but a small set of developers have been working on reverse engineering this GPU class for the past couple of months. This driver does not yet contain any 3D functionality or support for features that most end-users expect. At this point, the driver just contains very basic initialization and set video mode support for a portion of the Radeon X1000 family. Even with this very basic R500 driver, we couldn't help but to explore the Avivo driver for the past few days."

Novell has shipped the first service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. "Novell today announced that the first service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is now available to customers worldwide. Featuring significant enhancements in virtualization, high-performance computing, security, interoperability and system management, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 from Novell lets organizations take advantage of the latest technical advances in the best-engineered, lowest-cost and most-interoperable platform for mission-critical computing."

"Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV are pleased to announce the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 RC1. This release is available to customers with an active Software Subscriptions Services subcription." There are a lot of changes and new features; you can find them in the announcement and changelog.

A team comprised of members from Bell-Labs, IBM Research, Sandia National Labs, and Vita Nuova has completed a port of Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputer. Plan 9 kernels are running on both the compute nodes and the I/O nodes and the Ethernet, Torus, Collective Network, Barrier Network, and Management network are all supported. Screenshots are available on the development blog, and a live-demo will be attempted during the USENIX poster session.

"Although USB connectors in monitors appeared many years ago, they have performed only secondary functions all this time. However, now Samsung offers an LCD monitor that is connected to the PC via the USB bus and can work without a graphics card."

"For the purpose of this article, just like the first one, a WebOS is defined as virtual operating system that runs in a web browser environement. Don’t like WebOS? Well, call it OnlineOS, or WebTop if you like. So, here is a review of another 10 functional WebOS', as well as some additional similar services which show promise but aren't launched or fully realized yet." More here.

"There's been a lot of talk on lists and blogs about an exchange between Linus Torvalds, Jonathan Schwartz and Theo de Raadt regarding licensing and documentation. It all started with a 'cynical' message from Linus about Sun's motivation with regard to Open Source. Jonathan Schwartz responded by extending Linus a dinner invitation. What? The romance was briefly interrupted by a message from Theo pointing out the doublespeak."

"Matt Dillon, one of the FreeBSD kernel developers, decided that several of the approaches being used in the 5.x series were dead-ends, and in July 2003 forked the stable 4.x codebase to form DragonFly BSD. The 4.x FreeBSD Foundation meant that DragonFly has been a solid platform from the start. DragonFly, like the other BSDs, imports code from other members of the family when it makes sense, such as the malloc() security features from OpenBSD, parts of the WiFi subsystem from FreeBSD, and USB code from NetBSD. In spite of this, development has been pushed in some unique directions."

OpenSUSE 10.3 alpha 5 has been released. "Linux 2.6.22 rc4; reduced size and cleaned up dependencies of some packages; glibc 2.6; Emacs 22.1; OpenOffice.Org 2.2.1 rc3; lots of package renames and splits to create smaller systems and allow a one CD installation; two one CD installation media: A GNOME CD and a KDE CD."

Patrick J. Volkerding announced the first release candidate of Slackware 12 in the current changelog. This will be the first Slackware release with a kernel from the 2.6 tree (2.6.21.5) as default. "It's that time again, and here we have Slackware 12.0 release candidate 1! If we're lucky, we got it all right the first time. Big thanks to the crew."

A very early initial draft of this review was posted on OSNews many months ago. The final version just went live and is about three times as long, now including open source alternatives, as well as a review of the new online word processor solutions.

Researchers at Intel are working on ways to mask the intricate functionality of massive multicore chips to make it easier for computer makers and software developers to adapt to them. These multicore chips will also likely contain both x86 processing cores, as well as other types of cores. A 64-core chip, for instance, might contain 42 x86 cores, 18 accelerators and four embedded graphics cores. In addition, Intel has updated its Itanium roadmap.