NetBSD is the oldest and least-used of the three major BSD derivatives. David Chisnall takes a look at how it's survived for so long and where it's going in preparation for the next release.

A lot has been said about the new user interface for Windows Vista. In this chapter from his latest book, Paul McFedries runs through the foundation, functions, and eye candy for Vista's latest UI.

"Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 is a preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for download to Web application developers, our testing community and users who want to get a sneak peek at the next version of Firefox. Please note that at this time, users should not expect all of their extensions, plugins and themes from previous versions of Firefox to work properly." Update: A guide on how to make old extensions work or port over to 2.0.

Amiga Inc, thought to be dead after stopping all communication with the Amiga community, have reappeared. The long spell of silence was broken when they answered 25 questions from the readers at Amiga.org. In the answers, the CEO of Amiga Inc, Bill McEwen revealed some information that once again brought back some hope in the Amiga community. Hyperion Entertainment and their partners have been busy working on Amiga OS4, which has been in available in pre-release form since April 2004. The final release is held back by the lack of suitable PPC motherboards to run OS4 on, but this seems to be finally resolved, and a final release is expected this year. The Amiga.org interview left a lot of questions unanswered, especially with regards to Amiga Inc's plans for OS5. So to get a clearer picture of where they are headed, I asked Bill McEwen to answer some questions."

OpenSUSE 10.2 alpha 5 has been released. Important changes: Linux kernel 2.6.18, glibc 2.5, Python 2.5, installation allows comfortable LVM partitioning, setup RAID automatically via the BIOS (so called fake-RAID support) in the partitioner, GNOME 2.16.1 (most packages are updated), KDE 3.5.5 SVN version, and more.

SuperFetch, a new feature of Windows Vista, is designed to intelligently manage memory pages to keep the system responsive even after running background tasks that take a lot of memory. Watch this Channel9 video to see how Vista attempts to form subsets of memory to page together. The speaker also touches on other new kernel-level features such as ReadyBoost and flash-based hibernate.

The JNode team announced the release of version 0.2.4 of the JNode.org operating system. JNode.org is an open source Java OS written in Java (with a very small assembler nano-kernel). This release features the first possibility of basic development under JNode. Screenshots are available, new features and improvements in this release listed are listed in the changelog.

Jim Gettys from the OLPC team has responded in a long weblog to Theo de Raadt's concerns over the use of the Marvell chip in the OLPC. Gettys explains why the Marvell chip was chosen and how the team is working on open wireless firmware.

One of the most innovative features coming in Windows Longhorn Server isn't really a feature as much as a whole new version of Windows. It's called Server Core, and it will only take one-sixth of the disk space of a normal Longhorn installation. It's not expected to need anywhere near as many patches and hotfixes as Windows 2000. It's a version of Windows that does not, in fact, use windows. It's breaking Microsoft's long-standing reliance on graphical interfaces and shaking things up in several of Microsoft's product groups.

"For a long time, Linux has been blamed to boot slowly, compared to other modern operating systems. In this article, we are going to focus on a new init system we developed for our Pardus Linux distribution, Mudur, together with other initiatives that are worth mentioning. Mudur is written from scratch in Python with simplicity, speed and maintainability in mind. It isn't a replacement for the /sbin/init command like some other alternatives, nor just a parallel script executor. Mudur greatly simplified our boot process, making it faster and more flexible. Authors look forward for future boot process research for further improvement and optimizations."

There's an interesting challenge in writing a good book about programming. At a certain point, you'll lose the newbies and alienate the technical. Below the line is a safe introductory book, above it is aimed at a smaller crowd. We had an opportunity review No Starch Press' Object-Oriented PHP, and found it fits nicely into the gap.

Ignorance can be bliss, but it's not a tight defense, lawyers say. When Apple disclosed Wednesday its internal investigation had uncovered some stock-option backdating, the company said Jobs was aware of the practice but unaware of its accounting implications. The probe also did not find any misconduct by Jobs or other current officers, the company said. In a blend of semantics and general legal analysis, however, securities experts say Jobs could still face some kind of penalty over the situation.

"Open-source support has appeared by default in X.Org 7.1 for R300 generation GPUs. While ATI does not officially support these R300 open-source drivers, this alternative have been gaining momentum with users largely due to the lack of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support in fglrx. This extension is needed for the AIGLX desktop eye-candy. These drivers do lack TV-out support and many other features found within ATI's fglrx drivers, but how does its performance compare?"

Here is OSNews' review of Xandros Desktop Home Edition Premium version 4.0 (a mouthfull). Xandros Systems was so kind as to provide OSNews with the top of the line version of their product, which includes, among other things, complete copies of Versora Progression Desktop, CrossOver Office, and various non-Free drivers and utilities. Read on for the complete review.