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.

"Last week, the Gentoo project entered the lowest point of its 7-year old existence. The single most telling statement attesting to this fact is this brief excerpt from the current issue of Gentoo Weekly News. 'The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project: Daniel Robbins; the following developers recently left the Gentoo project: Daniel Robbins' Yes, this is the same Daniel Robbins who founded Gentoo Linux back in the year 2000 and who left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project."

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.

Mandriva has launched the beta program for version 4.0 of its Corporate Desktop. "Mandriva is pleased to announce the launch of the beta program of Corporate Desktop 4.0, the brand new version of its enterprise-dedicated work station. Ergonomic, secure, comprehensive, easy to use and to administer: by consulting its corporate clients and by exploiting its experience in the desktop area, Mandriva developed Corporate Desktop 4.0, a distribution that can be installed in less than 10 minutes and extensively customized thanks to a new post-installation tool."

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).

The extension of daylight-saving time by a month in the United States is causing enormous grief for some IT administrators running Microsoft software, as many of the software programs running on their users' systems need to be individually patched to reflect the change. This year, daylight-saving time starts today - three weeks earlier than usual - and ends a week later than usual on Nov. 4.

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.

"Debian GNU/Linux used to have a reputation as the toughest GNU/Linux distribution to install, yet the easiest to maintain. In fact, Debian's package management system has played a huge role in the proliferation of projects based on Debian. Suffice it to say that anyone who can install their own operating system can generally install Debian Etch with little or no trouble. If you've never installed Debian before, it's fairly easy to walk through the default installation without realizing you have options. Let's explore the Debian Installer, to find out just what options we do have."

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.

Sun has announced a new set of products and services targeting developers, startups, and internet companies seeking to build and deploy their web infrastructure on Solaris 10. The three offerings are Solaris Express, Developer Edition, Solaris + AMP (Apache/MySQL/PERL or PHP), and an expanded Sun Startup Essentials program.

"Sometimes GCC emits something that can be described as Haiku poems - and you have no clue as to what it really is complaining about. This page is a collection of such gems, their meaning in English and how to solve the problem."

"Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards."

MINIX3 has received some new interesting ports. "Links, an advanced text-based www browser, and also Links-2, a version of links that displays webpages in an X window." Screenshots included.

"It's been awhile since I've done one of these but this is certainly a pivotal year in skinning. The term 'skinning' has really expanded in what it means. Today, skinning is loosely used to describe customizing in general. From phones, to PDAs, to computer cases, skinning has become an all purpose term. But for our purposes, we're going to stick with customizing the user experience of personal computers (primarily PC and Macintosh). This article will give a head's up on where I think, in my highly biased way, things stand and where I think they're going."