With more and more people migrating away from Microsoft's platforms, it's increasingly important for alternative operating systems to be well documented in order to attract and maintain new users. FreeBSD is already well documented; its on-line handbook is an extremely well detailed guide to the OS as a whole. But for the user new to FreeBSD, or even Unix as a whole, salvation may come in the form of SAMS' FreeBSD Unleashed by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann.

"Sony says it will begin selling disks to install Linux on PlayStation 2 and tools to develop Linux applications. Kits will include a 40GB hard drive, keyboard and mouse." Read the rest of the story at ZDNews.

Join Nick Stam at his interesting ExtremeTech article as he sheds more light on key differences between various interconnect technologies. See what's on the cutting edge: Hypertransport, 3GIO & PCI-X.

"Sources close to Microsoft confirm that The Beast is set to include a new relational file store at the core of its next version of Windows. Some roadmap slippage has apparently occurred, too, as the database core will be introduced into Longhorn, and Blackcomb has been pushed further back. That leaves a gap for a point revision of XP next year, although there's no sign of this on the roadmap just yet. The final feature set for Longhorn - the codename for the successor to Windows XP - hasn't been nailed down yet, and the database core had been rumored for inclusion in Blackcomb, the next Windows after Longhorn. It's highly significant, as it signals a much tighter integration between Microsoft's enterprise server products and the client. Microsoft will also offer a new peer-to-peer networking feature, say sources briefed by The Beast. A new "sub-workgroup" network level - a subset of the current "workgroup" - offers a finer granularity of network access for ad hoc collaboration. Microsoft is intent on P2P-style workgroup collaboration looks seamless, with additional updates to NetMeeting built in to the OS." Read the rest of the (leaked) report at TheRegister. An interesting reply from Dominic Giampaolo (creator of BeFS and author of the "Practical File System Design" book) on the database capabilities of BeFS, can be found at the bottom of the mentioned article.

Robert Watson is a member of the FreeBSD Project's core and security-officer teams, and founder of the TrustedBSD Project. For his day job, he is a Research Scientist in the network security research group at NAI Labs, studying operating and network security issues. His primary contributions on the FreeBSD Project come in the form of security enhancements to the system; the TrustedBSD feature set arriving in FreeBSD 5.0 will include file system access control lists, mandatory access control, and support for fine-grained privileges. DARPA is now funding a FreeBSD security research and development project at NAI Labs, and they also sub-contract to a number of independent developers in the FreeBSD community to complete that work. Read more for our exclusive interview with Robert.

SGI today announced the first in a powerful new line of next-generation workstation products, the Silicon Graphics Fuel visual workstation. The new workstation includes a single 500MHz R14000A MIPS processor with 2MB L2 cache or 600 MHz with 4MB L2 cache, 200 MHz front side bus VPro V10 or V12 graphics with up to 128 MB configurable graphics memory, 104MB texture memory and 48-bit RGBA (or 12-bit per color component - 4-bits higher than any other desktop system) with 16-bit Z buffer capability, industry-leading memory bandwidth (3.2GB per second) and graphics bandwidth (1.6GB per second) on the desktop, Dual Channel Display capability for double the screen real estate with a single graphics board at resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 at 72Hz on each screen, a wide range of peripheral options including internal CD-ROM and four integrated PCI slots, and the fifth-generation 64-bit IRIX 6.5 operating system.

InformIT.com features two special articles (free registration required), excerpts from the "Modern Operating Systems" book by Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum (who is also the author of Minix - the 'grandfather' of Linux). This book is valued as the Bible of the operating system design and implementation and every serious OS designer/developer has by his/her side. The two free chapters featured, are "A History of Operating Systems" and "Operating System Threads". A must read for everyone and if you are serious into operating systems, you should very well buy the book with no second thought. Our Take: It's that good. Highly recommended by both myself and my husband (who is already largely involved in three operating systems so far).

Motif is the industry standard ToolKit available on more than 200 hardware and software platforms. It is the de facto graphical user interface on UNIX systems in heterogeneous networked computing environments. Motif is also the base graphical user interface for the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and a number of other desktops. The new version includes the following changes: Ten new widgets have been added to the Open Motif toolkit. These widgets expand Motif's capabilities in areas such as geometry management, resource specification, and user interaction. User-defined "ToolTips" have been added to all widgets that are a subclass of XmPrimitive. Any widget that is a child of a VendorShell gains this functionality.

BSDVault.net has published the transcript of a Q&A chat with Jordan Hubbard, the prominent FreeBSD leader who also works for Apple's kernel team. The chat took place at the #freebsd IRC channel on the OPN server. In the very interesting chat, Jordan talks about MacOSX, BSD, SMPng and X11: "Well, I certainly have been using the X window system for a long time and have written a fair amount of software for it; for what it does, it rocks, but for what it doesn't do, it really sucks too. Don't even talk to me about font handling or printing. So I think that before you're going to see X really get some decent applications, you're going to have to finish the missing 5% of X, the part that was scheduled to take 90% of the time and so nobody got around to it. Plus, the whole UI war thing needs to end. Adobe is never going to port photoshop while nobody can answer "Which GUI environment is dominant and therefore recommended for use?" So I think X will probably remain the DOS of window systems. It is used for a lot longer than anyone predicted, deeply loved by its adherants who know how to do absolutely anything with it, ignored by the mainstream who will have moved on."

The BSD family of operating systems date all the way back to the 1980s when AT&T owned the legal rights to the OS known generically as "Unix". During that time, the source code was licensed out to a few communities, each of which developed their own proprietary version. One of the versions was BSD-Unix, named after the University of Berkeley. Due to license agreements with AT&T when Berkley tried to release their BSD-Unix for free, AT&T sued. The outcome of that lawsuit was the creation of BSD/OS, which was basically AT&T/BSD Unix with the proprietary AT&T code removed. Later on the commercial BSD was branched into what is today FreeBSD. FreeBSD currently runs on the Intel and Alpha architectures, with ports to Arm, Itanium, PowerPC and Sparc on the works.

"Red Hat, the top seller of the Linux operating system, will begin offering a higher-end and more specialized version of Linux later this year that won't be as easy to find as the current all-purpose package. Red Hat will demonstrate its coming Advanced Server product this week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York and plans to begin selling it mid-spring, said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at the Durham, N.C., company." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.

As if the Desktop Linux Revolution weren't enough, Wasabi Systems, Inc. will unveil what is being described as the "first commercial NetBSD boxed set" at LinuxWorld next week. Wasabi's new product is called the "NetBSD 1.5.2 Package Release for Desktops", and "comes ready to install, in a nice friendly box complete with CDs and a manual," said Wasabi founder and CEO Perry Metzger.

Mandrake Software released the first beta of their Mandrake 8.2 Linux distribution in two ISO CDs. They include kernel 2.4.17, XFree86 4.2, glibc 2.2.4, Window Maker 0.8, apache 1.3.22, Evolution 1.01, KDE 2.2.2, galeon 1.0, mozilla 0.9.7 and a lot of Mandrake Tools-specific changes & updates (screenshots). In related news, RootLinux released version 1.3pre1 which contains many updates and bugfixes. This release uses CUPS as printing system and PureFTPD as the default FTP daemon. The installation has been improved, and ext3 support was added. It also contains Linux 2.4.17, glibc 2.2.5, KDE 2.2.2, and XFree86 4.2.0. Recently, CRUX 0.9.2 was also released with many new features. Both the CRUX and RootLinux developers were interviewed by OSNews three months ago.

"Dig deeper with us into Sun's enhancements. You can now assert in Java, and you'll like the new logging capabilities. We've got benchmark tests of the new graphics routines, too. Java coders can now do what C programmers have done from the start with new classes for Regular Expressions. Pattern matching is now a piece of cake. Yes, it's still beta, but here's a preview of what's faster--and slower." Read the second part of the interesting Java 1.4 preview at ExtremeTech.