While the US courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft's FAT patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany. According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a "common namespace for long and short filenames". This was based on Microsoft's U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are "not based on inventive activity".

"The CentOS development team is pleased to announce the release of CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64. It is available via beta.CentOS.org mirrors and bittorrent. This release corresponds to the upstream vendor EL5 beta2 release."

"One of the biggest complaints about Linux, particularly from developers, is the speed with which Linux boots. By default, Linux is a general-purpose operating system that can serve as a client desktop or server right out of the box. Because of this flexibility, Linux serves a wide base but is suboptimal for any particular configuration. This article shows you options to increase the speed with which Linux boots, including two options for parallelizing the initialization process. It also shows you how to visualize graphically the performance of the boot process."

After yesterday's trip down memory lane with OS/2 2.1, I will today take you even further back. With the help of the recently released Apple Lisa emulator, ToastyTech (another invaluable tool for (G)UI fanatics such as myself) updated its set of screenshots from the Lisa Office System (version 3), the first commercially available graphical user interface for home use. "This Lisa emulator tries to give you the full experience of using an Apple Lisa. The backdrop is a photo of a Lisa that changes as the power light comes on and when you 'insert' a disk. It even plays the sound of the Lisa disk drive running as you access the disk. To start the emulator you must press the 'Power button' just as you would start a real Lisa." Read more for a few notes.

I have been both a Windows and Linux user for a long time (I started with Windows 3.1 and RedHat 5.1 kernel 2.0.x if I recall correctly) and have stuck with both for various reasons. I'm writing this article not as a DIY lofty vantage platform by which I can bash MS nor as a 'Why you should switched' flame bate piece, but have tried to keep an open mind and reflect the actually experience that I have had with Vista so far, regardless of OS political propaganda. Please keep in mind this is still an opinion piece and most probably to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Haiku has its first distribution, but it's not coming from the Haiku development team. Pingwinek has just released GNU/Haiku 0.1.0, what is claimed to be (probably?) the first distribution of the Haiku operating system, coming from Poland. According to the Pingwinek home page, GNU/Haiku consists of the base Haiku system plus 40 packages ported from the Pingwinek GNU/Linux distribution, and it includes the GCC 2.95.3 compiler, several simple games, SDL, Midnight Commander, and ncurses. GNU/Haiku can be run from a HDD, in QEMU and VMWare or as a Live CD. Screenshots are available, and the images can be download from this page.

Hi-Mobile.net sent us in a review unit of Panasonic's flagship point-n-shoot camera, the LX2. This camera kept the first place among other similar products in the past year with its two unique features: HD video recording and wide-angle for landscape shooting.

While browsing some OS/2 news websites, I stumbled upon the usage tutorial included in OS/2 2.1 at GUIdebook (an invaluable website for (G)UI fanatics such as myself). To set the mood: "This tutorial describes how you work with the objects (small pictures) on your screen. Some objects are folders, which contain other objects. Your screen is called your desktop (pictured on the right), which is a folder itself." Have fun, boys and girls, in 1993-style.

"Magnussoft launched this week their new online hardware database, which is open to everyone using ZETA to add their own workinig (or not) piece of hardware to the database. They also hope it'll be a valuable tool and resource for anyone wanting to try ZETA out on their machines, but aren't sure if their equipment will work on ZETA or not." Thanks to IsComputerOn for pointing this out.

This is release 0.3.1 of ReactOS, an open source effort to develop an operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003). Mainly, the work focused on rewriting certain parts of the ReactOS Core (kernel, HAL, bootloader, etc).

"Explore how to remotely debug a FreeBSD kernel that is running on a target machine without affecting system performance. In this article, examine setting up the debug environment using serial communication port, compiling modified kernel code, debugging, and troubleshooting tips."

Those wondering what's happened to VirtualAcorn's port of VirtualRiscPC to Mac OS X should look no further than this statement from VA's Aaron Timbrell: "It has been delayed for a number of reasons. The main one being time. Both Graeme and I have been busy on other projects. Further delays have been caused because I haven't been very well." There is also an article on how to build RISC OS.

"Not too long ago, ad agencies, design firms and other creative companies were about the only businesses that widely deployed Macintosh computers to their employees. But for a number of reasons, word of the benefits of Apple hardware - and software - on enterprise desktops is now spreading."

After the recent switch to the Ubuntu code base, Freespire has restarted their development process with the first alpha release of Freespire 2.0: "Freespire version 2.0 Alpha1U (1.2.42) is now available for download." The new release uses the latest Linux kernel 2.6.20, X.Org 7.2 and KDE 3.5.6, but many Freespire-specific features have yet to be implemented.