A dedicated group of norwegian students have now almost finished what is called "School-Linux" (or "skolelinux" in norwegian). After having put down about 11.500 hours of work, they are planning Norway's largest betatesting - starting on May 3rd. They have translated KDE, and over 350 programs to Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk idiomatisms). They also promise that you will be able to install "school-linux" with three mouse clicks. The finished product is scheduled for late August.

"IBM and Microsoft have been quietly busy behind the scenes for the last two years building a toll booth that could position the two companies to collect royalties on most if not all Internet traffic. While the technologies that form the foundation of that toll booth have yet to be officially recognized as standards by an independent standards body, the collective strength of IBM and Microsoft could be enough to render Internet standards consortia powerless to stop them." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.

Sun Microsystems on Monday said it has reorganized and re-branded its disparate software lines and put them all under the Sun ONE umbrella. By re-branding its software, Sun hopes to better explain, and hence sell, its software to large corporate customers. As a result, the iPlanet Web Server, software for running large Web servers, will be rechristened the Sun ONE Web server, while the Chilisoft ASP will go by the name Sun ONE Active Server Pages. Our Take: As you can see, Sun is going full speed with Sun ONE, which is pretty much a similar range of products and strategy as Microsoft's .NET. A lot of people in our forums have dismissed the whole idea of .NET (most without knowing what .NET and ONE really are), but the bottomline is that it makes sense on how the future of computing is going to look like. If it won't be Microsoft and its .NET, it will be Sun and ONE. Bottomline is that you can't get away from this "new way of doing things." Exactly as we said in the last paragraph of our .NET editorial two months ago. Update: Java and .NET battle for the web's future.

We got Linux distributions for geeks (Debian), distros for businessmen (Red Hat), home users (Mandrake) and... Germans (SuSE :). However, there was never before a distribution specifically targetting developers and speed, both at the same time. Enter Gentoo Linux, the fastest loading, fastest-operating Linux distribution to date.

CRUX is a lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. In the new version (195 MB ISO), there are about 45 package updates including glibc 2.2.5, XFree86 4.2, and kernel 2.4.18. Mozilla 0.9.9 is now the default browser. Pkgutils 4.1 provides means to protect selected configuration files from being overwritten when upgrading packages.

"I’ve been having a discussion with someone from IBM about whether it’s ever possible for Free Software to have a nice human interface. In theory, I think it is possible. But in practice, the vast majority of open-source projects are also volunteer projects; and it seems that the use of volunteers to drive development inevitably leads the interface design to suck. The reasons are many and varied, and maybe one day I’ll turn this into a long and heavily-referenced essay. But in the meantime, here’s a summary." Matthew Thomas, a Mozilla contributor, explains why not many of the Free applications feature a good UI like most of their commercial counterparts do.