Get the new Lycoris beta 48 from an FTP mirror near you. No announcement was published yet for it.

Marcelo Tosatti released 2.4.20-pre4 today. Included in the bug fixes and driver updates was the merge of JFS. JFS is IBM's journaled filesystem port from OS/2. JFS had previously been merged into the -ac tree (2.4.18pre9-ac4) and was merged into the 2.5 tree early on (2.5.6). JFS joins ext3 and reiserfs in the 2.4 tree. SGI's XFS is still awaiting inclusion into the stable tree. Read more at KernelTrap.

The new Qt 3.1 upgrade features hundreds of enhancements, TrollTech claims. Among the features are better ActiveX support, Motif integration, while for MacOSX you will find integration with the Appearance Manager, anti-aliased text drawing, and user settings. The Qt OpenGL support for OSX is also greatly improved, and uses the hardware-accelerated drivers. Also, Qt 3.1 offers more classes available for multi-threading, thereby optimizing performance. Elsewhere, GTKmm 1.3.21 for GTK+ 2 was released.

Rational on Monday spruced up its XDE Professional tool with support for Microsoft's Visual Basic.Net language and ASP.Net class library technology, which makes it easier to build complex Web-based business systems by handling much of the underlying plumbing. In the meantime, Microsoft is shipping to testers a new Visual Studio .NET, codenamed Everett Beta 1.

"Now Wal-Mart's website is selling $299 PCs that run on an operating system called Lindows (Microsoft is suing over the name), while another Linux brand called Lycoris Desktop LX is about to hit the shelves at CompUSA. The ubiquitous Linux logo, a penguin, is already a hit at places like IBM and much of the U.S. government. Should the rest of us tune him in too?" Read the article at Time.com. On the other hand, eWeek has a kinda opposite article: "Linux vendors are showing a renewed interest in developing a desktop version of the operating system to challenge Microsoft Corp. But many corporate users are simply not ready for—or not interested in—such a product."

"It's not an easy job, but Hewlett-Packard is determined to support no fewer than five major operating systems: Linux, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS and Windows. Dig a bit deeper and it's even more complicated with three main flavors of Linux -- Debian, Red Hat, and UnitedLinux -- and at least as many versions of Windows -- Windows 2000, XP and the up coming .NET Server." The story is at NewsForge.

Justin Armstrong wrote JaysOS, a "toy OS" that runs on the Gameboy Advance. It provides preemptive threads, semaphores, condition variables, and message queues. As of 0.2, it also includes a port of the Waba VM for Java bytecodes. Waba comes with a few interesting demo applets you can try out. The OS apps interact with the world using the "UI Manager". Screenshots and more information available.

The third ("null") beta of Red Hat Linux has been updated. New in this release include lots of bug fixes and gcc-3.2. Gcc-3.2 allows for better ABI compatibility going forward. Note that C++ apps compiled on the first beta will not run on this beta.

Sun Microsystems Inc has maintained that it will be developing its own extensions to the Linux operating system after confirming suggestions that its recently released Sun Linux 5.0 distribution is based almost entirely on Red Hat Inc's Linux 7.2, writes Matthew Aslett. You can also read an interview with Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy.

A thought-provoking New York Times article examines the evidence that Apple may secretly be working on a PDA/Phone device. It cites some cryptic statements by Steve Jobs about how PDAs are going to be replaced by phones, and some not-so-cryptic ones about the sorry state of the handheld offerings today. The article's main evidence, though, is the interesting proliferation of features in Max OS X.2 that have more immediately applicable benefit in a handheld, like handwriting recognition and the "internet distilled" functionality of Sherlock (also seen in the shareware app Watson). Apple already has a license to use the iPod software in a second device.

KDE 3.0.3 primarily provides stability enhancements over KDE 3.0.2, which shipped in eary July 2002, and also contains a security correction for SSL (Internet security) certificate handling. The full announcement can be found here.

A few days ago, we published our special report from LinuxWorld. Now, it is time to check out some of the pictures we took from the expo!

Here is an overview of assembly language from a PowerPC perspective that contrasts examples for three architectures: ia32, ppc, and ppc64. This article assumes a basic understanding of computer design and of operating systems (system calls, exceptions, process stacks). It contains information that will be useful to PowerPC programmers unfamiliar with assembly as well as programmers who already know IA32 assembly and want to broaden their knowledge.

The MacOSX beta was a preview for hardcore fanatics. OSX 10.0 was not for the faint of heart. And OSX 10.1 was the first version of Apple's new OS that was ready for everyday use. So what should we make of OSX 10.2 -- also known as Jaguar -- now that it has arrived? Read a review at MacWorld, and another one at RagingApathy. Expect the OSNews review for MacOSX 10.2 Jaguar on the 26th of this month.