With the 2.4 release of Linux come many new filesystem possibilities, including Reiserfs, XFS, GFS, and others. These filesystems sound cool, but what exactly can they do, what are they good at, and exactly how do you go about safely using them in a production Linux environment? Daniel Robbins, CEO and president over at Gentoo Linux (and creator of the sophisticated Portage packaging system) answers these questions by showing you how to set up these new advanced filesystems under Linux 2.4. In this final installment (Part 10/10), Daniel shows you how to get XFS up and running on your system and explores some of XFS's more advanced features. Recommended reading is also the previous article, Part 9, exploring XFS's features over the other Linux filesystems. In a similar recent article, Bert Scalzo for Linux Jounral, benchmarks ReiserFS, JFS and ext2/3.

Daemonnews reports: "FreeBSD/sparc64 now boots multiuser on multiprocessor Ultra and Enterprise class machines with all CPUs active. We believe this is the first open source BSD operating system to fully support SMP on UltraSPARC hardware."

KDE 3.0 was finally released. The official announcement will come soon, but for now, you can download KDE 3.0 for Conectiva, FreeBSD, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE, Tru64, YellowDog or the source code. Debian, IRIX, AIX or Solaris packages not available yet.

"Many low-end Mac users lament Apple's choice of NeXTstep over the BeOS as the foundation of Mac OS X. Many arguments have been made on technical merits, and many blame the demise of Be, Inc., on Apple and Microsoft. The following is an in-depth look at the demise of Be and reflections on Apple's choice of NeXT. Hopefully this will debunk some common ideas about BeOS and lay this debate to rest." Read the editorial at LowEndMac.

Many interesting articles at O'Reilly's .NET corner, more than twenty articles, most published the last month. Among the very recent ones, you will find "Uncovering Rotor -- A Shared Source CLI", four parts of Web Services essentials, "An Architectural Tour of Rotor", "Get Your Rotor Running" (which includes some compiler speed differenes between FreeBSD and Windows) and many more.

This editorial at Rush Magazing talksback to Apple's request to hear from PC users. The author has a problem with the speed, price and "complete hardware" solution Apple is providing. On the pros, the auhor lists the way the machines look and the fact that underneath you are dealing with a BSD UNIX. On a similar editorial at ZDNews: "But as it turns out, our reviews team recently did a hands-on with the fastest Power Mac on the market, equipped with dual 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors. Though it's obviously the fastest Power Mac yet, it's interesting to look at what you get compared with a high-end PC. The system's P133 SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, 64MB Nvidia GeForce4 MX video card, and not-so-SuperDrive all look pretty pedestrian next to the Dimension 8200 and Pavilion 950, yet the Power Mac costs $3,000 without a monitor."

"First of all, I would like to thank TerraSoft for providing me with a free review copy of Yellow Dog Linux 2.2. Yellow Dog Linux is currently the only PowerPC distribution that does not exist for other platforms. Although YDL is based on RedHat, it's a unique distribution and it's understandable that each release of YDL is followed with great interest by the PowerPC Linux community. This review will take a close look at their latest and greatest." Read the review at iMacLinux.

OSNews reader Sylvain Martin writes: "The Clicker Operating system is moving forward. With last release 0.8.0, the system is now able to start user-level programs from another user-level program! This is a major advance if you consider that versions 0.7.x required the user-level program to be embedded within a system module. A pre-compiled demonstration package of 0.8.0 should be made available in a very soon future."

In this interview with a top VP at IBM Grid Computing, an old idea coming back, is defined as the next emerging technology. Specifically, cheap bandwidth and interoperable standards have created an environment where Grid Computing is not only possible but also "the natural evolution of the Internet".

"The purpose of this paper is to provide a concentrated, yet pragmatic, overview of ADO.NET by highlighting the performance and usability benefits of using ADO.NET with Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The intended audience is architects and developers who are familiar with ADO and are interested in learning about data access in the Microsoft .NET Framework." Read the article at MSDN. "When developing the design-time architecture for the .NET Framework, Microsoft chose to use source code as the persistence mechanism for user code rather than a binary or other private solution. Code persistence allows users to learn from the code that the Designer outputs as well as be able to easily build projects outside of the Visual Studio .NET environment if desired. It also allows understandable and accessible customization for advanced scenarios and components." Read the article at MSDN.

"Anyone made leery by the unfulfilled promises of the dot-com era may feel skeptical, or at least confused, about Web services, the latest wave of innovation on the Internet. Sky-high expectations and reams of hype are too often the death knell for emerging technologies. Will this one be any different?" Read the rest of the story at C|Net News.com.

Gentoo Linux is a high-performance ports-based Linux metadistribution for x86-based systems. Gentoo Linux 1.0 has finally been released. You'll find install instructions and ISOs and build tarballs (and on mirrors soon). Gentoo Linux is said to be the "fastest" Linux distribution to date, incorporating patches that make it extremely responsive. It is mostly aiming at developers though, as its installation procedure is definately not for newbies. Gentoo uses Portage as its package system, which is a mix of Debian's apt-get and FreeBSD's ports system, incorporating the good points of both technologies.

In a live interactive streaming audio/ICQ interview, by UGN at the AmigaExpo in Baltimore, Hyperion released even more interesting details regarding the development of AmigaOS4. Some highlights: