Linked by Rahul on Thu 26th Nov 2009 00:11 UTC
Fedora Core Distrowatch takes a first look at Fedora 12 and concludes that it is an excellent release with faster package management including yum with the Presto plugin that pulls in delta updates by default, improved security such as a smooth SELinux configuration and hardware support. "After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Nov 2009 00:09 UTC, submitted by Cytor
Mozilla & Gecko clones A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content. Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.

 

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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Nov 2009 23:50 UTC
Google Google has opened up its gallery for developers to share Chrome extensions, a step that soon should make it easier for people to customize the open-source browser. Aaron Boodman, a leader of the Chrome extensions effort, announced the move on a mailing list posting Monday, and programmer and "gallery master" Lei Zheng shared details in a blog post. So far, only uploads are permitted. Google plans to let some testers use the gallery to download extensions, too "in the next few days," Zheng said. "We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Nov 2009 23:48 UTC
Java This article describes the various refactorings available in Eclipse Java Development Tools, including what each refactoring does, when to use it, and how to use it. It also explores the refactoring script functionality in Eclipse, which allows library developers to share code refactorings with their clients.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Nov 2009 23:46 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
KDE KOffice 2.1 has been released. "This release is a marked improvement of almost all parts of KOffice compared to 2.0. Version 2.0 was labeled a 'platform release', which was meant as a first preview of the framework and new UI paradigm. In version 2.1, most applications and components have improved significantly but should still only be used by early adopters and probably not as the primary worktool."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Nov 2009 16:57 UTC, submitted by Jim Hodapp
Gnome The GNOME Journal team has published issue 17 of the GNOME Journal, titled "Women In Open Source". This is their first issue with a unified theme, and with all articles written by women from the open source community. The idea and execution of this issue was created by the GNOME Women community. It comes packed with articles about GNOME and its underlying frameworks.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Nov 2009 16:55 UTC
Databases Database security is the single biggest concern with today's Web-based applications. Without control, you risk exposing sensitive information about your company or, worse yet, your valuable customers. In this article, learn about security measures you can take to protect your PostgreSQL database. Be sure to download the sample code listings used in this article.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Nov 2009 00:06 UTC
Microsoft Microsoft has delayed the open source release of their Windows 7 USB/DVD tool, which contained GPL code. "As you know, Microsoft recently committed to making the source code as well as binaries for the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available this week, under the terms of the General Public License v2 as described here. While we worked extremely hard to try and get the code ready for release by today, we still need to test and localize it. Our goal is now to release the tool in all languages on the same day in the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to make the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available once again."

 

Linked by Rahul on Mon 23rd Nov 2009 23:48 UTC
Fedora Core Phoronix has a done a set of benchmarks with the Fedora 12 Intel driver and concluded that it performs better than previous releases of Fedora. "Compared to Fedora 11 especially, Fedora 12 offers much-improved Intel Linux graphics. Besides just the frame-rates being better, when using Fedora 12 we have encountered less problems with kernel mode-setting and quirks with different hardware configurations. In fact, the Intel experience is quite pleasant atop Fedora 12. This is good news for those running Fedora 12 now and should be even better news for those that will receive these updated packages in their distributions next year."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Nov 2009 23:43 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
OSNews, Generic OSes "HP is pleased to announce the availability of OpenVMS Version 8.4 Field Test. OpenVMS Version 8.4 will be a generally available release for the Integrity servers and Alpha platforms. This release builds upon the capabilities provided by OpenVMS Version 8.3 for Alpha and Version 8.3-1H1 for Integrity server systems."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Nov 2009 18:23 UTC
Apple "So you like Apple's fancy Magic Mouse? It's a beautiful piece of engineering with an insane price tag of $70. Problem is, even at $70, it only works on Macs leaving Windows users in the dust. But thanks to a hidden update here is how you get this little guy to work in Windows XP (32 bit) to Windows 7."

 

Linked by Rahul on Mon 23rd Nov 2009 17:01 UTC
Fedora Core Phoronix talks about an upcoming feature in Fedora 13 (scheduled to be released on April 2010) that provides system rollback support via the Btfs filesystem.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 21st Nov 2009 11:28 UTC, submitted by Mike Saunders
OSNews, Generic OSes A new version of the learning tool OS MikeOS is available, sporting a new BASIC interpreter with 24 instructions. You can run BASIC code from inside the text editor by pressing F8. See the App Developer Handbook for a guide to the BASIC dialect (somewhat similar to old 8-bit BASICs, nostalgia fans), and the User Handbook for info on running MikeOS from a USB key, floppy or CD.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Nov 2009 21:58 UTC
IBM German website Heise Online has received confirmation that IBM is terminating its Cell processor line. This means that no future development will take place, making the PoweXCell 8i the last Cell processor. Parts of the Cell project will still make it into future processor designs, however.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Nov 2009 21:51 UTC
Windows "The Growl for Windows Project developers have released version 2.0 of their Windows-compatible port of the Mac-based Growl global notification application. The major update includes a number of bug fixes, performance improvements and new features."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Nov 2009 21:44 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems "Dell reported its third-quarter earnings results Thursday, showing a small improvement over the last quarter, but revenue was down 15 percent over the last year, and profits fell 54 percent. The company reported revenue of $12.9 billion, within analysts' expectations between $12.8 billion and $13.5 billion. Earnings were 17 cents per share, when excluding 6 cents of pretax expenses and amortization. That's 54 percent off the 37 cents Dell recorded a year ago. Besides its acquisition of Perot Systems last month, there weren't too many positive signs in the recently completed quarter. Shipments were also down 5 percent across its businesses."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Nov 2009 21:39 UTC
Internet Explorer "Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds - or at least something fairly frequent - of Internet Explorers. Ars talks to Microsoft's general manager for Internet Explorer, who says the IE9 development cycle will look much the same as previous versions. We don't think that's a great idea."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Nov 2009 23:32 UTC
Mozilla & Gecko clones "Camino - the Gecko-based browser with native Cocoa interface and more seamless Mac OS X integration - has finally landed an official 2.0 release. The browser uses a much newer version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine (the same one used in Firefox) along with updated tabs and improved security features. However, Camino still lags Firefox in support for Web fonts and advanced HTML5 features like the video tag and offline storage."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Nov 2009 15:29 UTC, submitted by AlexandreAM
Microsoft "Microsoft, which has been pursuing concurrent improvements for its Visual Basic and C# programming languages, plans to open up compilers for the languages and add capabilities for asynchronous programming and immutability. Discussed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the blueprint for the two languages will feature compilers as services and accommodations for multicore processors, said Luca Bolognese, program manager for the languages group at Microsoft."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 19th Nov 2009 12:56 UTC
Microsoft "Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. The announcements also blow right past Amazon EC2 and targets Microsoft at Google, Force.com (Salesforce.com's cloud), OpSource and others offering hosting on demand, web services and bus interconnection services in the cloud. Microsoft peeled back last year's Azure onion, showing us how Microsoft wants to do much more than just offer computing platforms or hosted Microsoft products."