"Today is a great day for PC users, both personal and business alike, and a great day for the PC industry with the launch of Yoper - Your Operating System," reads the bombastic release announcement for Yoper V1. Yoper (Your Perfect Operating System) is a lean and fast Linux distribution with an endearing superiority complex. This is the debut release of Ydesktop, which is aimed at workstation/desktop or terminal server use. See more at Yoper.com.

As reported in New Mobile Computing, it seems that Microsoft's buyout of Connectix is already bearing fruit, as the Visual Studio.Net 2003 developer tools will include Virtual PocketPC, a PocketPC envoronment that should make developing and testing PocketPC software on a Windows desktop easier.

The Mac Observer has posted a reader poll and commentary on the topic of whether Apple should embrace USB 2. Commentary at AppleLinks. In other Apple news, Apple is preparing on launching an online music service. Also, longtime hardware developer Steve Sakoman, a former Palm and Be executive, has rejoined Apple Computer as a vice president. Mr Sakoman was involved in the Mac II development and was the main guy behind the creation of the Newton. At Be, he designed the first generation H0bbit-based BeBox, the one that had 5 AT&T CPUs, back in the early days of Be. He later left and when he came back became Be's CTO.

"An even bigger endorsement comes from Microsoft Corp., which will begin shipping a 64-bit Windows server operating system for Opteron ahead of the chip's launch. And in a break from the company's traditional hand-in-hand relationship with Intel, Microsoft execs are talking up Opteron. They say the AMD chip helps companies that want to move at their own speed. "With 64 bits, some customers are going to want to ease into it," says Bob O'Brien, group product manager for Windows Server 2003." Read the article at BusinessWeek.

Want to keep your Windows file systems at peak performance? Start by following this guide to tweaking cluster size, picking the best naming structure, and more.

Digital media applications are unique in that they can generally consume all the performance they can get. Unlike other tasks that execute in a few seconds, the rendering of stills, audio and video can take several minutes or even hours. Applications in the digital media space can translate increases in performance to increases in end-user productivity, and it is therefore beneficial for them to take advantage of the latest platform technologies.

"Publishing this article has been avoided for quite some time. The emotions behind LindowsOS is simply too great for objectivity to be used for both Tux Reports reviewers and for readers. We've witnessed flame wars in forums, mean-spirited posts in response to positive statements regarding LindowsOS, and we've fallen prey to our own biases regarding this distribution. However, after using the product we now believe that we can give a brief look at some of our experiences in relation to our expectations and then help others sort out some of the underlying controversy they may have read on other sites." Read the review at TuxReports.

ActiveWin posted an article explaining the new licensing model of Windows Server 2003.

The final beta/RC version for Mandrake 9.1, RC2, is now available. The final version of Mandrake 9.1 is expected between 15th and 20th of March.

"The Linux kernel project is growing up. New contributors, job delegation, and a source code control system have changed the way the kernel gets hacked. The guy at the center of it all -- Linus Torvalds -- has changed, too. Gone are his days as poster boy for Open Source. He doesn't do Comdex keynotes anymore; he's not on the covers of business magazines; and he rarely gives interviews. No, these days, Linus is all about what he does best: hacking the kernel and keeping a sure and steady hand on the rudder of everyone's favorite project." Read the interview at Linux-Mag.com.

OSNews featured two reviews of the new 12" Powerbook from Apple last month. Using a machine and more fairly evaluating it, is a continuous process, so when new facts emerge, we should be reporting them back. So, what I discovered this weekend is that my 12" Powerbook doesn't like... the mountains. Read on, it is an interesting issue. Update: The issue is now logged at Apple's tech support db.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely announces that FreeBSD 4.8-RC1 i386 mini ISO and FTP installation directory are on ftp-master. He says that the Alpha release will be available shortly. The plan is to make FreeBSD 4.8 available only for i386 and alpha platforms. Subsequent 5.1+ releases will have FreeBSD available for all platforms including sparc64, ia64, etc. Read the announcement at BSDForums.org.

From DistroWatch: "A new Slackware Linux 9.0 is fast approaching a point of release. See the complete changelog for the long list of changes, which includes all the latest goodies such as XFree86 4.3.0 and KDE 3.1. There is no ISO image to download, but you can rsync the current branch with one of the Slackware mirrors or, if you are lucky, with the main Slackware FTP server."

Recently, Sun Microsystems Inc. hosted its annual analyst conference in San Francisco. The company faces high-end competition from IBM Global Services and low-end competition from companies including Dell Computer Corp. offering clustered systems running the Linux operating system. While not dismissive of the threats posed by the competition, Sun President Scott McNealy in a one-hour interview with eWEEK Editor-in-Chief Eric Lundquist and Labs Director John Taschek contended that the company is poised to capitalize on the research and development efforts launched over the past several years.