Today marks a new release of the Visopsys operating system, version 0.66. "This is a maintenance release, featuring the ability to resize Windows Vista partitions, more reliable loading on various systems, better exception handling, color text in graphics mode, improvements to the C library, and a number of bugfixes." The changelog has all the details.

"I'd like to connect the dots between Apple's iPhone graphics, OS X, LLVM, and the ARM architecture, and what it means for compilers, interpreters, high-performance embedded software systems, specifically in graphics and bytecode engines."

"Linux has a large amount of device drivers for hardware not supported on FreeBSD, especially USB devices. Not rarely, such drivers have been written based on information derived by protocol sniffing, reverse engineering and the like. This makes the code highly undocumented, and renders the porting effort extremely error prone. To help with this task, I decided to start working on an emulation layer that would let us recompile the linux source code on FreeBSD, and provide a sufficiently complete emulation of the kernel APIs so that device drivers (or at least certain classes) could be used without modifications to their source code."

"I had the opportunity to speak with several KDE developers recently. Benjamin Reed, Jaroslaw Staniek and Ralf Habacker are several of the many talented developers working on porting KDE to Mac and Windows respectively. They explain in detail what's involved in making KDE and its myriad of applications boot under Mac and Windows."

"The UNIX operating system provides a rich set of features that allows processes to communicate with each other. Known as Inter-Process Communication, you can use this communication method to reconfigure an application at run time or to share data between different processes that are running in parallel. This article teaches you how to identify the methods that applications can use to communicate with each other, select the most appropriate method for your application, and begin your implementation."

After 17 years with the company, Jim Allchin retired from Microsoft as of Jan. 30, 2007 – the day on which Microsoft officially released the Windows Vista operating system to consumers. James (Jim) Allchin served as co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division from September 2005 until his retirement. In that position, Allchin shared overall responsibility with Kevin Johnson for the division of the company that includes the Windows and Windows Live Group, Windows Live Platform Group, Online Business Group, Market Expansion Group, Core Operating System Division, Windows Client Marketing Group, Developer and Platform Evangelism Group, and the Server and Tools Business Group.

Dell announced Wednesday that Kevin Rollins has resigned as chief executive officer, and company founder Michael Dell has retaken the helm of the PC company. "This is not a short-term assignment," said Bob Pearson, a Dell spokesman. Dell, who founded the PC company in 1984, will retain his duties as chairman of the board of directors.

"This story is for anyone considering or interested in switching from Mac to Microsoft's very beautiful new operating system, Windows Vista. I made the switch several weeks ago, from my trusty 12" PowerBook to (at first) a 17" HP widescreen notebook. Was my switch from Mac to Windows Vista easy? Was I able to 'Think Different', the other way around? And a month later, have I decided to stick with Vista or go back to the Mac? Read on to find out - and please, before you send hate mail, read the whole story."

The new AROS Developer Robert Norris has been interviewed by the AROS Show. "One of the original goals for AROS was 100% compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1. This is a noble goal, but it's not particularly forward-looking. AmigaOS has moved on since then, and there will be no new m68k hardware, yet many AROS developers are intent on making sure everything they do can be made to work on the older systems. That's their perogative of course, but my concern is that by constantly looking backwards we're missing the opportunities in the future."

"Elive is a live CD Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment window manager. Elive aims to provide an aesthetically pleasing environment with a full suite of desktop applications that runs efficiently on older systems. Its developers aren't finished yet, but they've come a long way with Elive since the release of 0.3 more than a year ago. This CD shows how beautiful distributions can become without being bloated."

"Microsoft Windows Vista launched for general purchase on January 29. If you want to get information about modifying and deploying your open source application in Microsoft Windows Vista, you should check out this blog item on Port 25. There is a Q&A style interview about the Microsoft DevReadiness.org community site as well as other resources to help you get your FOSS application Vista-ready."

Firefox port developer Peter Naulls has offered an alpha-quality build of open source email client Thunderbird for RISC OS. The software is currently suitable for Iyonix, A9, and Omega computers only. You can get the build here.

"They say it’s never polite to point out a woman’s age, or make note of her wrinkles and liver spots. It’s just not mannerly, and besides you never know when the old gal may thrash you over the head with her cane in backlash. But enough about my grandmother." More here.

"As World+Dog gets its head around Windows Vista, lets look back at an operating system that might have been a contender, very nearly becoming Apple's next-generation OS and, but for Linux, almost certainly the key alternative to Windows on x86. Ladies and gentlemen, who remembers BeOS?"