osOpinion Webmaster Kelly McNeill stopped by to tell us about a review of Linux-Mandrake 7.2 on that site. “Mike” writes: “I’ve always maintained that Linux could be a useable desktop OS if some of the development community worked toward that end. The Gnome and KDE people obviously feel the same way. It now takes fewer mouse clicks to install Linux than any version of MS Windows and, hey, it works right outta the box.”

Looking for a friendlier way to tell your users the document they’re looking for isn’t available? Zez.org’s Paul Kenneth Egell-Johnsen offers a few tips for making a more informative 404 error page with Apache. Thanks to NewsForge reader pkej for the pointer.

A post at LWN.net details two recently discovered issues with the Common UNIX Printing System’s access control and network behavior.

ZDNet’s Jason Brooks comments on the future of Windows and its alternatives: “The wicked Windows 9x witch is nearly dead. Sometime next year, a tornado of marketing hype will emerge from Redmond to drop a house on Microsoft’s marquee product. And, as its feet shrivel, I’ll not shed a tear.”

“Next year, Palm will begin offering a back-end platform to support enterprise applications with integrated application services tailored for individual business users. Through the platform, corporations will be able to allow employees access to networked applications through their Palm personal digital assistants.” Full report at ZDNet eWEEK.

ZDNet News reports that Time Warner, in an effort to appease regulators and win approval for its merger with AOL, will allow Earthlink to offer high-speed Internet services via its cable networks.

New Netscape packages are available that fix a buffer overflow in parsing HTML. Full details at Help Net Security.

From a report at ZDNet Interactive Week: “Tired of undecided elections? Since June, Sun Microsystems had promised a vote on two Executive Committees that will take over Sun’s supervisory role of the Java Community Process, a collaborative technology-building process that makes additions to Java. The vote is in, and some aspects of it revealed sentiments within the Java community.”

LinuxPlanet’s Michael Hall took Linux and GNOME on the road to this year’s Comdex. “There’s always a moment’s hesitation when you try out favorite tools in a new environment, and dragging a fairly new laptop off to Comdex this past week was no exception. As it turned out, though, GNOME provided the perfect environment for everything I needed to do to keep caught up between walks around the convention floor.”

In a press release at Businesswire, Macmillan USA announced the release of Linux for Windows. “With Linux for Windows, experienced computer users can easily and inexpensively try the increasingly popular Linux operating system without losing Windows functionality or making changes to their desktop.”