Red Hat released the beta for their upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) line. The release is tagged release 2.95, Taroon. The next official release will probably be called RHEL release 3 (as usual, Red Hat does not confirm their upcoming release version and date).

"Forget SCO & Microsoft. The single biggest thing keeping Linux from the desktop is Linux itself. It's time to stop adding new features, and finish what's there." Read the 3-page editorial at ExtremeTech. Our Take: While there is no such thing as "finished software", as software by definition can always be improved, it is true that Linux projects (especially desktop apps) need to outline and release full-featured, solid, well tested versions of their software and offer less smaller ones that require the user to constantly upgrade and be in a state of flactuation. What is needed in smaller projects are real release engineers that can outline goals and releases wisely (the Gnome project, PostgreSQL and Apache are good on that for example, smaller projects could learn a thing or two from these bigger projects).

This guide will introduce you to XFce, the popular (CDE-inspired in the past) Unix/X11 graphical environment, and it will give you pointers how to install it.

From Mac news site MacMinute: "Victor Kulesh today announced the release of Veta Universal Palm Edition, which will turn a Bluetooth-enabled Palm PDA into a wireless remote control for your Mac. "Now users can use their Tungsten T Palms to remotely control many applications such as iTunes, Keynote, DVD Player and even the mouse on their computers." Veta Universal Palm Edition is priced at US$10."

Linux on Desktop is what Xandros trying to push when they took over the Corel Linux. Their effort in attracting Windows refugee with their version 1.0 was quite a success. Now Xandros released their updated version of Xandros OS Deluxe version 1.1. OSForge is reviewing this release.

"Without a doubt, Linux has become fully accepted as a powerful, scalable and stable platform for enterprise deployments. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the cost of deploying Linux is getting pretty close to the cost of deploying some other enterprise platforms." Read the editorial at eWEEK.

Apple today seeded build 7B53 of Mac OS X 10.3, Panther, to developers. "We are fast approaching first candidate build," Apple told developers in the build's seed note. As usual, the new build was posted to the Apple Developer Connection Web site.

"Much of what Microsoft has done over the past year or so might suggest a company settling into middle age. It has overhauled its management structure, tightened its financial controls, expanded its financial reporting, started paying dividends and abandoned the high-tech currency of stock options in favor of risk-free grants of shares to employees. " Read the story at SFGate.

From Mac news site MacMinute: "Bare Feats has published a performance comparison of all three Power Mac G5 models. "It looks like the Dual G5 2GHz has the best bang for the buck," the site reports. "The average speed advantage over the G5 1.8GHz is 45%. Yet it only costs 25% more (factory standard configuration).""

The WinNT-inspired OSS OS ReactOS released recently 0.1.3.

When .NET launched, one of the most talked-about feature was rich metadata. But what does that mean to the day-to-day developer? Shawn Wildermuth discusses why understanding the way metadata can be used in your types can open up development avenues you never knew existed.

L.A.S. Linux is a 'live CD' distribution of Linux (based on Knoppix) with a CD-bootable toolkit for information security professionals and systems administrators. Its small footprint maks it able to fit on a 185MB mini-CD. Despite its small size, L.A.S. contains over 100 security tools including basic desktop applications, an array or forensic, penetration testing, intrusion detection, sniffers, and administrative utilities. Changes in this latest version include the addition of Ettercap-GTK, Clam Anti-Virus, MiniCOM, SpikeProxy, MRTG, and many of the Cisco-centric Open Source Exchange tools.

Motorola is planning on selling its 19% stake in the Symbian Consortium to Nokia and Psion. The company claims that it isn't ending its relationship with Symbian nor will it necessarily cease to use the Symbian OS in its phones, but that its focus is on developing its Java environment, and the underlying OS isn't that important to them. Motorola recently developed a Linux-based smartphone.

It's semi-official: the next major update to Windows, which has already had its release slip from 2004 to 2005, will likely be even later. Microsoft executives are now reluctant to even discuss a release date. "We do not yet know the time frame for Longhorn, but it will involve a lot of innovative and exciting work," said Bill Gates at a recent financial analyst meeting.