Seven months after announcing plans to take up where Microsoft left off with its Windows Longhorn client development, a group of members of the Joejoe.org site have built a working prototype of what they’re calling 'Longhorn Reloaded'. Earlier this week, the Longhorn Reloaded developers and testers posted for download Milestone 1 of Longhorn Reloaded. "Longhorn Reloaded is a Project dedicated to the revival of the Operating System known as Code Name 'Longhorn'. To put the projects aims simply, we aim to finish off what Microsoft started before the operating system was canceled. It is a modification of Windows 6.0.4074, which was originally released during the 2004 Windows Hardware Engineers Conference," explained the Longhorn Reloaded team on the Joejoe Web site.

"Some say the Classmate PC is Intel's answer to (or competition with) the One Laptop per Child effort. Intel is hawking the lilliputian laptop in 'emerging markets' like Nigeria, India, and Mexico as a solution for worldwide education of primary and secondary students. It's to be officially released and shipped en masse to schools in Africa and South and Central America by the end of June. Recently my children and I borrowed a Classmate PC loaded with a custom version of Mandriva Linux. Most of us had fun."

"Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon's TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it's very difficult to declare these skills -- or any computer skill, really -- dead." My Take: "C" dying should have been "x86 Assembly".

If online articles and blogs are any indication of things, the number of Linux users migrating to, and satisfied with, Ubuntu GNU/Linux seems to be staggering. Given that, it was only a matter of time before a capable company had the resources to offer accessible, affordable Linux desktops and notebooks that delivered the way that Apple's products have. Colorado-based System76 sent us their Darter Ultra for review, and proved that there is an OEM hardware/software combination capable of being the primary PC for the general public.

The Efika book is a free multilanguage ebook dedicated to the Efika mainboard from Genesi. It contains information about the Efika hardware, its setup and its supported operating systems (Linux distributions, MorphOS). The latest version can already be freely downloaded in English, French and Swedish. Some older versions can also be found in Czech, Italian and Russian. It will be available soon in other languages such as Spanish, German, Turkish, Greek, Portuguese and Polish. This book follows his previous work on the Pegasos book.

"The one 'hole' in my workflow has been OCR. For years, people have been able to scan a document and have it converted into real text. One of my old printers even came with OCR software included - for Windows of course. But when I've really needed OCR, I've just assumed that there were no high quality packages available for Linux. Recently I decided to find out for myself (a complete OCR virgin) what is available, how to use it, and what the results are like. I installed every free OCR package I could find, and systematically tested them. They all work very differently, so I tried to design a simple test for my specific needs."

"PCLinuxOS is a live CD distribution that enables users to test Linux without actually having to install it. The highly anticipated new version, PCLinuxOS 2007, was released on Monday. Its intuitive selection of software, high level of stability and functionality, and the quality of the graphics make this the distribution's best release ever."

"After some gap due to a busy few months for many of the BeleniX folks a new release is now available. Get it from the download page. Lots of changes have happened and here is a summary: Based on OpenSolaris build 60, fully modular Xorg 7.2, Compiz 0.5.0 3D manager integrated into Xfce and KDE, and much more."

Dwm 4.1 has been released. "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed. It is the little brother of wmii."

"Looking for a way to limit users' functionality on a publicly available machine, such as a kiosk machine for conference attendees? No one wants people trying to alter their systems for fun or malice. If you're running the GNOME environment, you can turn to a tool called Pessulus - a lockdown manager for the GNOME desktop."

Prior to the general availability of AIX 6, IBM intends to make a pre-release version of AIX 6 available in an open beta. "AIX is an open, standards-based UNIX operating system that provides the enterprise information technology infrastructure for thousands of clients around the world. IBM intends to take the next step in the evolution of the AIX operating system with the release of the AIX V6.1 OS."

KDE 3.5.7 has been released. "This release has a renewed focus on KDE PIM applications. KAddressBook, KOrganizer and KAlarm received attention with bugfixes, while KMail additionally witnessed new features and improvements with both interface work and IMAP handling: it can manage IMAP quota and copy and move all folders." In addition, Munich's KDE distribution LiMux has been certified to meet the international usability standard ISO 9241.

IBM finally took the wraps off its much anticipated Power6 microprocessor, which company executives said will double the clock speed of its current Power5 chip, without stretching the power envelope. The Power6 processor, unveiled at an event on May 21 in London, is a dual-core chip with a top clock speed of 4.7GHz, double the 2.3GHz of the Power5+ processors. The new chip also includes 8MB of L2 cache - four times as large as the current Power5 offering - and an internal bandwidth of 300GB per second. Ars' John 'Hannibal' Stokes obviously also has his say.

AfterStep 2.2.6 has been released. As was the case with the last release, the changelog simply reads: "Everything got touched. It's all good." If you have 2.1.0 or later installed, you can use the upgrade package. Alternatively, you can wait for your distribution to package it for you.