Jon Hall, president of Linux International, is a passionate spokesman for the open source community and ideal. In this two-part interview, he speaks at length on the progress and challenges for open source, and on the need to recapture a purer vision of education.

While the capabilities of operating systems have improved over the last years, the improvements have largely focused on under the hood changes. New functionality is reaching the user via additional applications which allow her to write a DVD, connect to her mp3 player, download streaming video locally and other tasks which were not present before. But the graphical interface of the computer itself is keeping the same concepts introduced with its appearance. One could argue that the graphical environment of computers is exactly the same for the last 10 years and only cosmetic changes take place in newer versions of operating systems. Moving away from the desktop metaphor is harder than it seems. Even alternative operating systems have embraced the concept instead of exploring new ideas. This article describes a solution which attempts to free the user from the files/folder concept.

Blake Ross helped make Firefox one of the biggest open-source success stories ever. Just wait until you see what he's up to now. Ross's is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox's. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he's building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he's leading the charge with a simple battle cry: "One interface, not two!"

"In this article, see how HAL 9000, the computer in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie , the smartest believable artificial intelligence so far in fiction, could predict equipment failure, answer personal questions, learn to sing 'Bicycle built for Two', and go insane, based on IBM Build to Manage Toolkit components. By the end of this article, you'll see how autonomic computing can be implemented today; determine if there is such a thing as a Hofstadter-Moebius loop in programming; and discover if HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic computer, Heuristic Autonomic Learner, or is simply the first three letters of a prankster holiday that occurs about this time of the year."

Metasploit founder HD Moore has released an exploit for an unpatched vulnerability in the Apple Airport driver that ships with some PowerBook and iMac computers. Moore said the exploit is not related to the Wi-Fi driver flaws discovered and discussed in Aug. 2006 by researchers David Maynor and Jon Ellch at the Black Hat Briefings. Moore, who is collaborating with Ellch on Wi-Fi flaw research, named the exploit after Daring Fireball, a Mac blogger who doubted the Black Hat findings and issued a public challenge to Ellch and Maynor.

Many BeOS enthusiasts were eagerly awaiting the results from the contest Haiku held in order to determine its icon set. People unfamiliar with BeOS won't understand what the fuss is all about; well, BeOS's isometric icon set was one of the defining elements of the look of BeOS. I am happy to report that the icon set for Haiku is almost exactly identical to the svg version of the original BeOS icon set (used in Zeta, among others). On a slightly related note, there's news about Vista's icons as well.

"Mandriva 2007 may be the best distribution I have used. Looking through Mandriva's forum, you see employees of the company who care and are genuinely trying to help. Mandriva offers 'Free as in freedom' versions and versions with propriatery software. You would expect a release like this to be trumpeted. Instead, the release was met with hostility. Forums on tech sites were filled with Linux users cheering for the end of Mandriva. What happened? How did a company that was loved at one time become so unpopular? Is the hostility justified?"

Edgy. Eft. Review. "Dapper Drake was a huge step forward since Breezy Badger. Edgy Eft doesn't impress as much but still brings its lot of innovations and improvements over its predecessor; its artwork is a tiny bit better, its software selection is more up to date, its package manager is better than ever and its new upstart makes it really fast to boot. Of course it doesn't have the desktop and the artwork of Fedora Core 6, or the integrated 3D effects of Mandriva 2007, but it's still in my opinion the best Linux distribution there is and as with every single one of its releases, it just proved it once more."

"How do the latest versions of each browser compare? For this prizefight, we looked at Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's first new Internet browser since 2001 and Mozilla Firefox 2, Mozilla's update of its popular Firefox 1.5 browser released in November 2005." This will be the last Firefox 2 vs. IE7 article. I promise.

"One of the main benefits of an open source WebKit is allowing developers to download nightly browser builds from the WebKit Open Source Project page. Nightly builds allow you as a developer to prepare for changes before they wind up on your users' desktops. This article describes how you can leverage WebKit nightly builds to determine how changes in the framework may affect your web content, Dashboard widgets, or WebKit-based application in future versions of Mac OS X."

BETA3 for the FreeBSD 6.2 release is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. There have been a lot of fixes to many things since BETA2. The most important of the things that have been worked on is the driver for em(4). More info here.

"We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.0. This is our 20th release on CD-ROM (and 21st via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of ten years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As in our previous releases, 4.0 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system." More here. Update: First review here.

"Today, I'd like to share with you a hidden gem inside of Windows Vista's search capabilities. It's a neat little feature that lets you build one saved search on top of another, and we call it Query Composition. Think composition in the mathematical sense, not in the context of writing an English paper. To explain this feature, I'd like to start by talking a bit about Libraries."

"During tests, Fedora Core 6 impressed eWEEK Labs with the progress it has made toward making Security - Enhanced Linux - and the dramatically improved security protections that SELinux helps afford - more palatable. We also liked the look of Fedora Core's new graphical and command-line tools for managing Xen virtual machines, although, as with every Xen product we've yet tested, plenty of rough spots remain."