There were an amazing number of people (around 300,000) who visited OSAlert recently to read Scot Hacker's article on MacOSX. As part of the camp of BeOS refugees, I have been searching for some time for a suitable replacement. Many come close - FreeBSD is fantastic, but still complicated, the new school of Linuxes are very close to ready for me, even Windows XP has come a long way. My x86 machine is pretty fun - it gets a new OS every two weeks or so. But what does that say - that I like variety or that I can't find what I want? I'd suggest most of us still feel that we're missing something - otherwise, why read osnews.com?

There is a new version for the unstable build of mySQL 4.01, WindowMaker 0.80 (with some nice new features), GCC 3.03, while KDE released version 2.2.2 for FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

Just in time for Christmas, one of the well known AtheOS developers, Kristian Van Der Vliet ('Vanders'), released as a Christmas gift to the AtheOS community the first full scale native AtheOS application, the email client Mercury. We normally do not post on such application releases, but this app is indeed a major step for AtheOS. From Vanders and all of us here at OSAlert, Merry Christmas to all !

The SkyOS developers are working on brining lots of new features in the new version 3.6 as you can see here. A new screenshot can be seen here as well. MenuetOS is prepared to release version 0.63 which enables the MTRRs for the Intel LFBs resulting to a much faster GUI. Also, a newer version of FreeVMS was released recently.

The founder of the Python programming language, Guido van Rossum, writes: "On December 21, just in time to be placed under the Christmas tree, we're issuing the final release of Python 2.2. We're proud of this release, and expect that you'll like it". Read what's new in the new version and other related information.

From the announcement: "The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has secured a license from Sun Microsystems to distribute a native FreeBSD version of both the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Thanks to the great efforts of the FreeBSD Java team, these should be available for inclusion with the upcoming release of FreeBSD 4.5 in January, 2002. The general availability of a distributable version of Java will benefit end users, commercial users, and developers who use FreeBSD. Java continues to grow in popularity and has become heavily used in server side web applications, one of FreeBSD's core areas of strength. With an officially licensed binary Java distribution, FreeBSD becomes an ideal platform for execution, development, and deployment of Java based solutions."

This milestone version, features basic S/MIME support, 'favicon' support and the Document Inspector, a tool to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. Download from mozilla.org.

The source code for ID Software's Quake 2 is now available for download, and is also released under the GPL license. The .plan file for John Carmack has the details. If you know working mirrors for the downloaded archive, please post about it on the comments section of this story.

Caldera announced it has made Suites VII and IX of the AIM Benchmark available under the GPL. The AIM Benchmark Suites - "AIM Multiuser Benchmark" and the "Independent Resource Benchmark" - are expected to be available shortly as a SourceForge project. They are currently available via FTP from Caldera's site. The AIM Benchmark technology has proved useful for more than a decade in measuring performance of hardware and versions of the UNIX operating system. The benchmarks have been licensed by nearly all of the vendors of UNIX system hardware. In all, more than 70 companies have used these benchmarks to compare and tune products. In addition, because of the stressful multi-dimensional nature of the AIM Benchmark workload, many OS and hardware vendors have used the benchmarks as part of their quality assurance process.

Macslash.com reports that according to the Software Update readme, the 30.3 MB MacOSX upgrade brings the following: "The 10.1.2 update delivers improvements and new functionality, as well as expanded peripheral support for Mac OS X. Enhancements include: Updated and new USB and FireWire device support, including FireWire-based digital cameras, PC Card storage devices, including media readers, IrDA modem support for FireWire-based PowerBook models, Audio, Display, and Speech improvements, Networking and Printing improvements, AirPort v2.0, Apache web server v1.3.22, AppleScript v1.8". Update: Of the version that potentially will become 10.2 or 10.5, leaked screenshots have been released on the web.

Back in 1997, there was exciting news coming out of Cupertino. Apple had spurned Be and acquired Steve Jobs ... er... NeXT and announced its grand new OS strategy. We all know how the story ends, but it's fun to remember how the story began. The first article is a real blast from the past, since it talks about Apple's Network Computer strategy. The second article is a non-programmer's journey into Objective C prgramming with the NeXT tools, then called the Yelow Box, now called Cocoa. Enjoy!

Eclipse, IBMs open sourced development tool donation (which is now supported by an organization of a number of companies), just got a little stronger as the released their first plugin sub-project. The C and C++ IDE for the Eclipse platform, with focus on Linux development and deployment. On a similar note, developerWorks is offering a trial download for WebSphere Studio Application Developer for Linux which is a pluggable tool-development and integration platform that incorporates the technology found on Eclipse.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KDE 3.0beta1 based on QT 3.0, the third generation of KDE's free & easy-to-use, Internet-enabled desktop for Linux and other UNIXes. This second pre-release of KDE 3.0, which follows two months after the release of KDE 3.0alpha, ships with the core KDE libraries, the core desktop environment, and over 100 applications from the other base KDE packages (administration, multimedia, network, PIM, utilities, development, etc.). KDE 3.0 is scheduled for final release in the second quarter 2002, with one or more intervening "RC" releases preceding the final release. Read the changes made to Beta1.

"A college computer technician who offered his school's unused computer processing power for an encryption research project will be tried next month in Georgia for computer theft and trespassing charges that carry a potential total of 120 years in jail." Read the unusual story at TheRegister, where this technician is facing jail because he installed the Distributed.NET client on some (mostly) idle computers. The authorities are charging him with "hacking" even if they realize that no hack took place. Our Take: When I left my pre-previous job, I left the distributed.NET client running on the Dell dual PII-450 PC I used to work with...