I heard so much about this product (some good, some bad), but I had never really tried it before Lindows.com sent us in the latest version of their OS, LindowsOS version 3.0. I took it a spin for two weeks now, and here is what I think about it (and for the eye-candy seekers, screenshots included).

Windows .NET Server 2003 Release Candidate 2 is released to beta testers. Upgrade or join the Customer Preview Program today and see what's new. Update: An anonymous sent us a link on Microsoft's site which describes at a high level how they migrated the entire site to .NET Server RC1. According to the article they are experiencing high levels of uptime and significant performance increase that they may even reduce the size of their cluster.

Left on its own to interpret the order of the universe, IBM would have you believe any IT decision maker with any common sense would choose to migrate from Solaris to Linux any day: And they have the SWAT team to do it. With the momentum for Linux Intel servers, IBM is throwing its weight behind Solaris-to-Linux migration to gain market share. Read the article at OpenMagazine.

Now that there are a number of independent projects seeking to create BeOS compatible systems, BeUnited has launched an effort to share and promote the open standards for these Open Standards BeOS-compatible Operating System (OSBOS). Read about it at BeUnited.org

eWEEK Executive Editor/News Michael R. Zimmerman and EiC Eric Lundquist caught up with Ruiz at Comdex in Las Vegas recently for a candid conversation about AMD's challenges, its future and Intel's influence in the market. On another CPU-related interview, HP has the task of migrating its Unix customers running HP-UX on PA-RISC, as well as recently acquired Tru64 Alpha customers from Compaq, over to Intel's Itanium architecture. Making sure this transition happens smoothly in Australia is Steve Williamson who transferred from Compaq and now is business development manager in HP's business critical systems division.

As dominant systems and software companies continue to pour millions into scaling Linux for the enterprise, some observers now believe the open-source OS's future is to serve as a distributed, network-based operating system. Read the article at InfoWorld.

Fred Langa test-drives the latest version of LindowsOS 3.0, this Linux-based Windows work-alike operating system to see if it's ready for prime time.

The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.3 "Twin Pines", is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is intended for testing and hacking purposes only. You will need XFT2 and fontconfig to build it. Among the changes is Sawfish which has been removed completely and replaced with Metacity.

There was a very long break in development of this operating system, and people could only download the boot code and a nearly empty file that promised to contain AuroraOS. But this is over now!

Coming from a background of using MS-DOS for about 4 or 5 years exclusively (MS-Dos 4.1 or something) Being new to Linux and *nix in general I thought that I would want to learn from the "ground up". I did not want the bloat of Redhat or Mandrake but wanted something simple where I could learn the "stuff" of the OS.

"The version I've been using is Red Hat Linux 8.0, shipped by Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat in late September. This is the first Linux distribution I've tried that hasn't made me feel as if I'm about to step on a rake and have its handle swing into my face. Parts of this are still infuriatingly convoluted, but if you've been thinking about trying out Linux on part of your hard drive -- or about dumping Windows entirely -- this is what I'd recommend." Read more at WashingtonPost.

"In recent times, the desktop Linux world has been enriched beyond recognition by the KDE & GNOME projects, but window managers are still at the heart of these environments, as well being used widely on their own. I'll delve into this exciting world and look at the development and the state of the art of some of the most significant and most popular window managers." Read the article at FreshMeat.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced yesterday the release of PostgreSQL v7.3, now available for download. Numerous changes include: support for the SQL 92 Schema spec, enhanced dependency tracking for complex databases, prepared queries for maximized performance on common requests, expanded logging options, supports data in many international characters sets, dozens of performance enhancements. Update: A report at eWeek about mySQL & PostgreSQL's progress.

The new release of the objC GNUstep API, 0.8.3, contains preliminary support for OpenGL. Other improvements include simple printing, print previewing, and more documentation. Also recently, the C++ APIs of Fox Toolkit and wxWindows had new releases too. Update: FLTK had a new version too.