The third release candidate for Slackware 8.1 has been released. Changelog here.

Axel, Bruno and the rest of the company in the OpenBFS team, have completed the development of OpenBFS, the open source equivelant of Be's popular 64-bit journaling file system. OpenBFS currently runs on BeOS 5, awaiting the further evolution of the OpenBeOS/NewOS kernel in order to start a back port. The team reports that while the filesystem clone is not very well tested yet, it is already seems pretty stable and it beats in performance the original BFS.

Gentoo Linux 1.2 has been released; basic changes include install-related fixes and countless updates to the Portage tree, such as KDE 3.0.1 (CVS 2002-06-04) and GNOME 2 (beta, CVS 2002-06-07) support. Note that GNOME 2 is still masked, but fully useable. New users can find install instructions here and ISOs and build tarballs. Existing users need only to "emerge sync" to be up-to-date.

"Hewlett Packard Co will today take the wraps off of the second release of its HP-UX operating system for workstations and servers employing 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel Corp. HP-UX 11i version 1.6, which will start shipping in the second or third week of July." Read the report at TheRegister.

"A year ago, investors were losing faith in Palm Inc. The once high-flying company itself admitted to frailty and mistakes. But Palm never gave up, and launches Monday a new operating system -- a crucial weapon in its battle to remain dominant in the competitive handheld market. Palm OS 5, analysts say, is a much-needed major upgrade from the pioneer of personal digital assistants' earlier operating systems." Read the report at Yahoo!. Update: Palm pins hopes on beefed-up OS.

One of the early GUI operating systems for the PC, that is still being developed today, is GEM, an operating system that was originally created by Digital Research in the early 1980s. GEM was described as providing a Mac like GUI for the PC – long before Microsoft Windows 3.1 or 95. Today GEM continues to be developed as FreeGEM and old and new versions of the GEM OS and GEM applications can be downloaded for free (see links below). The history of Digital Research and GEM is quite interesting, as GEM had the potential to become the "Windows" (or Mac) of the PC world.

ActiveWin reports that Microsoft has updated the Windows Platform SDK to include documentation, header files, and libraries for new APIs in Windows XP SP1 and Windows .NET Server. This edition of the SDK supports development for the following platforms: Windows .NET Server family and Advanced Server, Limited Edition, Windows XP, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, Windows 2000, Windows NT versions 3.51 and 4.0, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 95/98/98SE, .NET Enterprise Servers.

The software-only company Amiga Inc. has published a marketing document outlining how it will sell AmigaOS4, which will run on third party POP-based (PowerPC Open Platform) hardware. Now, however, the open hardware seems to become artificially closed.

"The next thing that any one should know after learning to make a boot sector and before switching to protected mode is, how to use the BIOS interrupts. BIOS interrupts are the low level routines provided by the BIOS to make the work of the Operating System creator easy. This part of the article would deal with BIOS interrupts." This is the second part of the series of articles on how to write your own toy OS.

The OpenBSD project is currently having what is called a "Hackathon", that is, as many coders as possible, get together for a little more than a week and hack, drink beer, hang around etc. This year, it all happens in Theo deRaadt's hometown, in Calgary, Canada. The slogan of this hackathon is: "Shut up and hack!" Check out pictures of the event, and see the (always growing) number of CVS commits here. The event is terminating late next week.

More thumbnails and fullsize images of the new Control Panel are up under the Sneak Peek section. Have look at this great addition to Lycoris Desktop/LX before you get the new version coming out on June 17th. Our Take: Lycoris is shaping up as indeed a great desktop system! Only problem I got with these screenshots is that either Freetype or the particular font used is not up to par. The font rendering quality is truly bad, and I have noticed such problems only under Lycoris.

Last year, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik thought Sun Microsystems' open source-based alternative to Microsoft's widely used Office software would encourage broader use of the Linux operating system on desktops and perhaps loosen the iron grip of Windows. But Szulik abandoned those hopes when Sun started charging for its StarOffice product and changed its way of dealing with the original equipment manufacturers, such as Red Hat, which can bundle it with their own offerings. Szulik accused Sun of adopting the domineering methods of mutual enemy Microsoft.

Giving off an impression as the Swiss Army knife of Linux books, "MultiTool Linux" by Schwarz, Anderson, Curtis, Murphy and published by Addison-Wesley, this book tries to solve very specific problems with Linux. Let's see whether it succeeds to do so or not.

From ActiveWin: "Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 users can now access the brand new and convenient Windows Update version 4 website after they download an update on the actual Windows Update website. Windows Automatic Updating feature notifies you when critical updates are available for your computer. This feature replaces Critical Update Notification if it is already installed. Critical Update Notification will no longer offer critical updates."