“Despite breathless promotion (‘the connectivity of your desktop when you are on the go’), WAP phones are not catching on. Overall, the mobile-phone business is exuberant. About 420 million handsets will be sold worldwide in 2000, according to a forecast by Dataquest Inc. But it’s unlikely that WAP phones will amount to even one in 10 of those.” Full story at MSNBC.

“OSFAQ.com has put together a AtheOS distribution on CD-ROM. If you don’t know what AtheOS is, it is a high performance multithreaded graphical operating system for the PC desktop platform. It supports TCP/IP, SMP, and features a 64-bit journaling file-system. Please check it out. AtheOS CD-ROM”
-Anonymous Reader

The Register reports: “Graphics behemoth Nvidia warns in its quarterly SEC form 10Q filing that it has been advised by Rambus it may be in breach of patents.”

From a gnome-announce post at LWN.net: “On behalf of freedesktop.org, the GNOME Project, and the KDE Project, I’m happy to announce that version 1.0 of the freedesktop.org extended window manager hints specification (EWMHS) is now available. This document specifies extensions to the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) which allow desktop environments to implement features such as pagers, task lists, or full-color icons via communication with the window manager.”

From a press release at NewsAlert: “ACCESS Co., Ltd. introduced a NetFront 2.6 Linux Software Development Kit (SDK) for the worldwide market that speeds the integration of ACCESS’ popular NetFront browser into Linux-based Internet appliances and other non-PC applications. This is the first development kit for a proven embedded browser available for the Linux operating system platform.”

Signal Ground’s Ken Treis takes a look at Eazel’s Nautilus file manager included with the latest Debian distribution.

From LinuxGram: “In another one of those awkward little moments that we have come to expect from Intel, the chip giant has confirmed that only Red Hat and TurboLinux can be installed on Pentium 4 boxes. The rest of the Linux herd won’t run on the hardware.” Slashdot readers discuss the story.

OpenBSD’s Theo de Raadt responds to Slashdot readers’ questions.

“Creating a firewall with ipfw and routing your internal private IP network through it on to the public internet while translating to public IP’s can be a harrowing task. This article is intended to give you step by step instructions for getting your ipfw/nat firewall up and working quickly and easily without having to go to other sources for information.” Full details at BSD Today.

VNU Net covers Scandanavian ISP Telia’s move to Linux for its Web hosting operations: “Bill Claybrook, research director for Linux and open source software at the Aberdeen Group, said there are “huge savings from a systems management point of view, security and the ability to respond quickly to new customers. Having Linux on S/390 means that there is only one large system to take care of, which almost never goes down,” he said. “Telia can create new web hosting sites in minutes rather than hours.”