"To what extent did alleged pressures from Microsoft Corp. deter PC makers from bundling Linux on desktops and servers? According to Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer at Red Hat Inc., the pressure had a lot to do with the lack of Linux penetration among OEMs." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Red Hat's claims are similar to Be's.

"In this whitepaper on Linux Scheduler Latency, Clark Williams of Red Hat Inc. compares the performance of two popular ways to improve kernel Linux preemption latency -- the preemption patch pioneered by MontaVista and the low-latency patch pioneered by Ingo Molnar -- and discovers that the best approach might be a combination of both." Read the long article with some benchmarking information at LinuxDevices.

"Sun is railing at Microsoft, but maybe it should be hiring coders rather than lawyers. Sun boss Scott McNealy is an entertaining act, with a nice line in puns. For example, Microsoft's .net becomes ".not", Intel's Itanium is the "Itanic", and IBM's Regatta server is "Regretta". As comedians, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are not in the same league." Yet another editorial on the web about Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft, this time on CW360. We wrote about this too.

Wil Wheaton is not like most of the rest of the actors. He admits that he is a true geek, running Linux, enjoying programming, playing lots of computer games. Many of you will remember Wil portraying "Wesley Crusher" in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" TV series some years ago. Wil will reprise his role as Wesley in the "Star Trek X: Nemesis" movie, the tenth installment of the Star Trek movies, which is set to be released two days after the second "Lord of the Rings" movie, at the end of this year. In the interview following, Wil talks about his favorite computer games, the computers used on TNG, the future of computing in AI, his favorite Linux distros, PHP and more.

"Microsoft .NET Framework Service Pack 1 provides the latest updates to the .NET Framework. Service Pack 1 is highly recommended for all users of the .NET Framework, including customers of Visual Studio .NET." Download the Service Pack at Microsoft.com. On related news "the Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package includes everything you need to run your Visual J# .NET applications on a machine that already has the .NET Framework installed. The Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package is not intended to run applications written with other Java-language development tools. Applications and services built with Visual J# .NET will run only on the .NET Framework; they will not run on any Java virtual machine."

Where did he come from, and what are his plans for 2.4? Marcelo Tosatti opens up to Robert McMillan about the joy, the fear, the challenges, and the rewards of being the Linux kernel maintainer. He also talks about his favorite hack. Stepping into Alan Cox's shoes is no mean feat, even for the most accomplished of hackers, but that is just what a little-known, 18-year-old Brazilian hacker named Marcelo Tosatti did this fall when Linus Torvalds handed over maintenance of the Linux 2.4 kernel tree to Tosatti instead of Cox. According to all parties involved, Cox wanted more time to pursue other projects, and after having maintained the 2.0 and 2.2 trees, it was time for someone else to do the job. Since taking over the job, Tosatti has managed three kernel releases, starting with 2.4.16; has answered, according to one account, close to 700 press queries; and has given the tersest Slashdot interview in history. IBM developerWorks caught up with Tosatti to ask him about his first four months on the job.

IBM and SAP announced general availability of mySAP.com on Linux for IBM eServer zSeries. This is just another example of the many ISVs that have migrated their applications to the Linux for IBM zSeries family. Here is the complete list of ISVs who have ported to the zSeries servers and the FAQ for mySAP on Linux for IBM eServer zSeries.

Most tech savvy geeks can work their way through a FreeBSD install, even if they have no prior UNIX experience. However installing an OS and configuring an OS are two totally different things. This article is targeted towards anyone who might be wondering about FreeBSD, but doesn't know what to do with it after they install it. This isn't then end-all be-all of FreeBSD howto's. Just some of the simple stuff. Update: Some of the readers of OSNews have emailed me concerning corrections that need to be made in this article. Dig in (third page) for more.

From the press release: "MandrakeSoft is proud to introduce Mandrake Linux 8.2 as the most feature-rich, multi-purpose Linux operating system ever made available to the public. New server features include the ability to use an encrypted filesystem for protecting sensitive data; "kernel-secure" adds important security features to the default Linux kernel; and an "Enterprise" kernel delivers SMP and Hi-memory support (above 1024 MB) for high-end servers. Mandrake Linux 8.2 also introduces a quick and efficient way to set up printers and scanners; a new file sharing feature for easily sharing files and directories in a networked environment; and improved "hot-plug" support that lets users install new devices quickly and painlessly without having to reboot the system. A new remote desktop utility, RFBdrake, is extremely useful for controlling machines remotely within a LAN or securely through the Internet."

"When Steve Jobs introduced Apple's new iMac in January 2002, the spotlight was focused entirely on the physical architecture of the first mainstream computer that fully defied the term 'box'. The new iMac is a white dome with a flat screen that floats on the end of a chrome arm. It looks like a cross between a Luxo lamp and a makeup mirror. Jobs called it 'the best thing we've ever done'". Read the rest of the MacOSX review at LinuxJournal.

Two months ago a lot of online magazines and "tip" web sites reported that WindowsXP reserves 20% of your network bandwidth so in case of a crash, debug information can be sent to Microsoft. InfoWorld says that this is not the case exactly and that there is a good reason behind the limitation.

Many companies tried to create a truly easy-to-use Linux distribution, but as they say in Greece "they reached the well, but weren't able to drink water". Corel, Mandrake, Lindows, Xandros, Stormix and many other distros tried or are still trying to bring Linux closer to Windows' ease of use and the millions of the desktop-oriented users. One of the new distributions that has many people impressed so far, is Lycoris (formerly known as 'Redmond Linux'). OSNews tested the latest Lycoris Desktop/LX and here is what we experienced.

Be, Inc disolved the company and stopped public trading on Friday. They now sell the www.be.com domain name as well. The company will still live on for at least 3 more years (without employees, but with a Board of Directors in charge), therefore their trademarks are still active. However, this did not stop a team of BeOS German enthusiasts, BeOSOnline.com, to release a 230 MB bootable ISO distribution of BeOS and name it "BeOS 5.0.4". Users should not confuse this release with any official means, as it is a plain BeOS 5.0.3 with additional developer tools and applications as found freely at BeBits.com.

From dot.KDE.org: "Adam Treat released the initial version of Qt bindings for C#, which consists of 476 Qt classes converted to C#. The bindings work with the Mono compiler, runtime environment and class libraries, enabling a fully Open Source implementation of C# for Qt. While not yet ready for a real application, Adam has managed to write and execute a Hello World! program (screenshot). KDE bindings are on the drawing board. Shortly thereafter, Phil Thompson, Jim Bublitz and theKompany.com released KDE 2 and KDE 3 bindings for Python. Together with the Java, Objective C and C bindings in the kdebindings module, as well as the Ruby bindings, KDE is providing developers a broad gamut of application development languages."