“Today, a PowerPC Linux user uses Linux instead of MacOS 9 for a number of reasons. It’s faster, more stable, is open source, has more software available, has a large open source community, and is free. Once MacOS X comes out, however, many of these benefits will be brought to the mainstream Mac operating system. Speed, stability, (partly) open source, more software, and a small open source community are added to the MacOS features list. Now Linux has fewer advantages over the mainstream OS than it used to.” More at Artificial Cheese.

From BSD Today: “For people who update FreeBSD
infrequently, say to the next RELEASE version, the system installer (sysinstall) provides an ‘Upgrade’ option
which installs the new system over the existing one. Using this method I successfully upgraded my FreeBSD
4.0 machine to 4.2 and this article will detail the steps I followed to do this.”

Alan Cox posts the latest changes to version 2.4.0-ac4 of the Linux kernel at Linux Today.

LinuxPlanet reports: “With the future of the company on the line, top officials from Corel Corp. plan on unveiling the company’s new corporate growth strategy on January 23. The executive team will roll out details of the company’s plans to employees and media at a special event to be held at the Ottawa Congress Centre.”

” SourceLib will be a categorized, searchable library of sample code. Each sample will be
a complete, standalone package of one or more programs that demonstrates how to use certain
APIs for some specific task, and it will include the source, make file, and anything else needed to
compile and run it. All samples will be either freeware or released under one of the licenses
approved by the Open Source Initiative.” More at Linux Today

Linux Today posts this week’s Tcl-URL.

“On Friday — coincidentally the day the government files its brief in the Microsoft case — a new movie opens nationwide. According to Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, the film is a “relentless suspense thriller” about “the high speed, high stakes computer industry.” It is centered on “a corporate behemoth whose power, greed, and paranoia knows no bounds,” and stars Tim Robbins as the company’s CEO — who just happens to be “the world’s richest man.” Full story at the Washington Post.

Reuters via ZDNet News reports: “State attorneys general say they are determined to pursue the antitrust case against Microsoft, even if the Justice Department, under President-elect Bush, tries to back away.

At LinuxPlanet: “We in the Linux world take for granted that Linux will be a player in the consumer-electronics space, if only for the fact that it has many attributes that make it a good choice for embedded systems, speed and reliability being among them. But judging by the vendors at CES, Linux isn’t close to breaking into this space. There really was only one vendor that was pushing Linux at all, and that was Agenda, showing off the Agenda VR3 in the shadow of Palm Computing in the Palm Pavilion.”

“In a study hardcore computer enthusiasts find
“repulsive and unconscionable,” at least 99.9 percent of the general population will have no
special recollection of Jan. 5, 2001, the day the Linux 2.4 operating system was finally
released.” More at SatireWire.