Vasper has breathed life into his BeOS Max project. "Well, as you might have seen on BeOS News sites, I have posted info on the haikumax.org site on an upcoming version of BeOS Max. It will be Version 4 to be exact. So to answer the major question. Why? Although Zeta is being developed, Magnussoft is not doing its best to keep it alive. I find it quite annoying that I have to return the product I purchased from Yellowtab, to get an upgrade. This for me is a show stopper. I don't want to wait in line at a post office, to send a package back to a company whose products I order from the Internet."

Sun took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world's help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress. On Tuesday, the company quietly released as open-source software a prototype Fortress 'interpreter', a programming tool to execute Fortress programs line by line. "We're trying to engage academics and other third parties," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said about the open-source move.

"PuppyLinux is one of the most popular 'flavors' of Linux, I have used it on several old P-II and P-III machines that I donated and it got them to work when the original OS (95 and 98) would not even so much as boot up. It was just after PuppyLinux's offer to be the OS for the One Laptop Per Child and the new 'Unofficial PuppyLinux Guide' came out that I first contacted Kenneth of PuppyLinux. I wanted to know more about Puppy, the OLPC and what goes into making a guide for a Linux distro, Kenneth was kind enough to share his experinces with me."

"When open-source developers and IBM took gambles on each other, free software showed it can flourish in the heartland of corporate computing." This is chapter 7 (free sample, so to speak) of a book on Linux and free software's rise to fame and use in the corporate world.

FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. "FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development."

"When Steve Jobs took the stage this week to present one of the most important products in his company's history, he knew that the very name of the iPhone was in dispute and that U.S. communications officials had not even approved the device. Those facts might have concerned other business leaders in his position. But Mr. Jobs didn't miss a beat." More here.

Last June a spin-off department of Red Hat, lead by desktop guru Havoc Pennington, announced Mugshot. Originally, Mugshot was in the midst of controversy whether it's a social networking application or not. Apparently, it instead is a "social networking aggregator". In order for this to work, access to third party data is a must.

The author of this article tells how tightly coupled are the Vista built in modules. As of date there is no known way to fix an individual component in case it gets corrupted.

In his 'A week with...' series, Justin has used PC-BSD 1.3 this week and is sharing his experience. In other news, the PC-BSD team unveiled a sneak peek of the new look of the software installation wizard.

As announced on the Haiku website and reported by IsComputerOn.com, Eric Petit has announced the development of a VMWare graphics driver for Haiku. Based on Be's driver sample code and code inspired by the X.org driver, Eric's driver so far implements RECT_BLIT and cursor functions (the latter are disabled as they are still buggy). The driver is already working as can be confirmed from this screenshot. On his initial post to the Haiku mailing list, Eric is asking for feedback, and has made the sources available in this tarball for those brave souls who would like to test the drivers.

Two new important ports to MINIX3 have been released. First and foremost, the Equinox Desktop Environment: "Equinox Desktop Environment (shortly EDE) is small desktop environment, built to be simple and fast. It is based on modified FLTK library (called extended FLTK or just eFLTK). Comparing to other desktop environments, EDE is much faster and smaller in memory space (EDE's window manager use less memory than xterm)." Secondly, ImageMagick can now be run on MINIX3.

A few days ago, Adam explained on his blog why it would make sense for Apple to port Safari to Windows: "Maybe it's making a leap of faith, and yes, the browser market is one where making a noticeable entrance will be challenging, but the less of a jump into the deep end buying a Mac is, the easier it is to make your Apple brand accessble, available, and not scary. The best way to start? Safari on Windows." Yesterday, Mary Jo Foley dug up from deep within Mozilla's Wiki the following prediction by the Mozilla Foundation: "Apple may have Safari on Windows with likely ties to iTunes and .Mac." This line has now been changed into a more general statement ("WebKit may be ported to Windows" - which already happened) but point remains: does it make sense for Apple to port Safari to Windows?

Linux.com has a review of the Fedora Core 6 live CD: "The current live CD is very usable. Its package selection makes it an ideal starting point for a new Linux user. It doesn't have OpenOffice.org and uses the freed up space intelligently to include SCIM and translations that'll allow it to reach more users."

"I am very happy to announce that we have shipped final versions of CrossOver Mac 6.0 and CrossOver Linux 6.0. Users of Intel based Mac systems can now seamlessly run many Windows applications on their Mac without needing a Windows license. Supported applications include Outlook, Visio, Project, Quicken, Steam based games such as Half Life 2, and many more. For Linux users, we have added support for Outlook 2003, World of Warcraft, a range of Steam based games such as Half-Life 2, and a number of other applications. Additionally, CrossOver 6 represents another major step forward in the evolution of Wine, so most users will find substantial improvements in the overall compatibility and behavior of CrossOver as compared to version 5."