Bernd Korz has announced that the Zeta development team and Magnussoft are parting ways . The team and Bernd will continue to develop Zeta, and the service pack (Zeta v1.51) will still be released in the coming weeks.

PC-BSD announced that it will deliver Opera in the next version of PC-BSD. Opera will be "one less thing you need to download after installation", as Matt Olander, CTO of iXsystems puts it, to get "a more usable system" out of your PC-BSD box.

Techgage has reviewed SabayonLinux 3.3 and concludes: "Fans of Sabayon will be pleased. Things just keep getting better. For those who have never touched SL, you should give it a try and see what you are missing. Even if you don't plan on changing desktops (like myself), it's one of the best distros to play with, or use as a Live DVD if you are on the road a lot. I had a few people test it out on Apple computers, and it works great there as well. No one is left excluded! Kudos to Fabio and his team for the great work on this latest release."

"In this article we look at some of the programs and projects - some obvious, others less so - that influenced the history of the RISC OS platform and its users. These are our suggestions, not a top ten and certainly not in any particular order. What other applications would you add to the list?"

After a long development period, we're ready to introduce the first "release candidate" of OSNews version 4. OSN4 is a very big change for us - for years, we've worked with the mantra "We render everywhere." We are still using MySQL and PHP, like in Eugenia's OSNews v2, but with the sudden prevalence of newer web technologies, we've decided that in order to really offer the best platform for our readers, it was time to enter a brave new world. Read on for details and the link. Updated: ("read more" to see update)

Microsoft is frequently dinged for having insecure products, with security holes and vulnerabilities. But Symantec, no friend of Microsoft, said in its latest research report that when it comes to widely-used operating systems, Microsoft is doing better overall than its leading commercial competitors. The information was a part of Symantec's 11th Internet Security Threat Report. The report, released this week, covered a huge range of security and vulnerability issues over the last six months of 2006, including operating systems.

"Nearly thirty years of growth haven't exhausted the potential of the REstructured eXtended eXecutor language. The first of the widely used 'scripting' languages continues to expand its capabilities and platform range, and it makes for a particularly good match with AIX."

I wrote the following article for university. It tries to explain the difference between three kernel types in such a way that less-computer savvy people should understand it. I had a 1500 word limitation, so detailed elaborations were out of the question. "In this article, I will try to make the 'microkernel vs. monolithic kernel' debate more accessible and understandable for laymen. I will explain the purpose of a kernel, after which I will detail the differences between the two competing designs. Finally, I will introduce the hybrid design, which aims to combine the two. In the conclusion, I will argue that this hybrid design is the most common kernel type in the world of personal computers today." Because of the limitations, this article contains little news for most of you. Still, I thought I'd share.

After a short period of development, today Vasper released a first beta of BeOS Max 4. Max is a 'distribution' of the free personal edition of BeOS R5, originally released 6 years ago by Be Inc. Vasper started working on BeOS Max long before Zeta came to life and in the years after Be closed down it was of the two actively developed systems, to other being Developer edition also based on PE. Get BeOS 5 PE Max V4 beta 1 here, a development report is viewable here.

The KDE Community and the release team have put together a release plan for the long anticipated version 4.0, which is planned to be released in October 2007. KDE 4.0 will likely contain initial versions of all the major subsystems that have been described in recent Dot articles. These 'Pillars' of KDE set the stage for desktop and application growth and maturity over the life of the KDE 4 series.

LWN writes about a InformationWeek interview to Linus Torvalds: "Finally, the real basic issue is that I think the Free Software Foundation simply doesn't have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral. Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not 'evil' or 'immoral', it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade - it's just a superior way of working together and generating code."

Virtualization of operating systems used to be slow and hard to use. Advances such as the KQemu accelerator, VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen and of course the recent integration of KVM virtualization into the Linux kernel have helped out a lot though, especially on the server side, but for a normal user, virtualization could be somewhat clunky. Mac users have been able to run their Windows applications like this using Parallels Coherence, yet now other *nix users can too. Ordinary desktop or business users who require applications from another operating system can benefit from a seamless desktop.

Almost two years ago, the FSF started work on the first update of the GNU GPL in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing. According to Peter Brown, the FSF's executive director, "We continue to work on the details of the GPLv3 as it relates to the situation presented by the Novell and Microsoft deal. We are researching issues related to potential unintended consequences of the language we plan to adopt. As soon as we are satisfied with the results of our research we plan to bring forward the next draft."

On the Etoile news blog, Quentin has posted an installation guide for the Etoile desktop environment. "Here are some quick instructions to build and install EtoileFirst you need to build and install latest GNUstep svn version (not the latest release), then you can build and install Etoile svn version too."