Fedora Legacy Project Announces End of Life Times; RHEL 5 Prepped

"With Fedora Core 6 Test 2 set to be released July 26th, it is time we announce the End of Life of our various Legacy supported releases. After much discussion on fedora-legacy-list and the #fedora-legacy IRC channel on the freenode network, we have decided to end of life the following releases when FC6 Test2 is released: Fedora Core 1 & 2, Red Hat Linux 7.3 & 9." In the mean time, Red Hat is prepping its next big release, RHEL 5, supposedly a rival to Novell's SLED 10.

On Politics, GNOME, and Mono

Politicians. They are a certain type of people. I do not like them. Many do not like them. I think if there's one thing all of man has in common, whether he be Christian or Muslim, black or white, young or old, American or European, is a dislike of politicians. But then-- why on earth do we allow politics to complicate software? Note: Sunday Eve Column.

Howto: Xen from Backports on Debian Sarge

"There is a great howto about installing Xen on Debian Unstable. It is really easy to do and it runs fine. Nevertheless, on production servers, that's not an optimal solution. Debian Unstable has too many updates and things change too often. On production machines, a Xen host system should be stable, secure and should not need much attention. That is where Sarge comes in. If you pull the Xen packages from backports and install them on Debian stable you've got the best of both worlds."

Why Linux Isn’t Mainstream

Toby Richards wrote an opinion article for NewsForge, claiming that for him, Linux won't get mainstream until Evolution - or another capable Outlook-like client - gets optimized and offers 100% compatibility with Exchange. In the comments section of Newsforge readers offered more reasons as to why Linux is not mainstream, offering a view on their needs. My take: While for my personal, home usage of Linux my needs are different, I agree with Toby that companies won't switch their desktops if full Exchange compatibility isn't reached and if Evolution stops being the memory beast it currently is.

The 2006 Linux Filesystems Workshop

The Linux file systems community met in June 2006 to discuss the next 5 years of file system development in Linux. Organized by Val Henson, Zach Brown, and Arjan van de Ven, and sponsored by Intel, Google, Oracle, the Linux File Systems Workshop brought together thirteen Linux file systems developers and experts to share data and brainstorm for three days. Read here, here and here.

Latest Advancements in Speech Recognition

Talking to your computer has been a staple of science fiction since at least the 1960s, but it looks as if it's finally coming within reach. This week saw the release of the first speech recognition software capable of handling continuous speech without the user having to train it in advance, namely Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) version 9. For anyone else who tried IBM ViaVoice or Dragon Dictate a few years ago, found it awkward to get the system used to your voice, and even more awkward to speak in a staccato word-by-word fashion, this is a huge leap forward.

The Birth of PC Gaming

In the early days of the 1970s, computer games were little more than a fantasy to most of the world’s population. Only the very few hardcore computer tech specialists had even the faintest inkling that computers could be used for more than calculating complex equations and filling huge rooms with noise, heat, and the faint stink of unwashed code math majors.

Haiku’s Networking Status

Haiku's Axel Dorfler has stated that Haiku's networking stack is more or less complete. "the basic networking infrastructure should be more or less complete now. Also, when booted, and an interface is up, the stack should also respond to ARP requests. However, that it is more or less complete doesn't necessarily mean it will work fine - when implementing the protocols, we'll definitely find some rough or even missing edges, I'm sure." In addition, a week ago, the latest Haiku newsletter was released.

Dell Knew Of Dozen Burned Laptops Before Recall, Records Show

Dell grappled with apparently severe overheating problems in scores of notebooks for at least two years before it announced a recall of 22000 notebooks last year, according to a source close to the company. The source allowed CRN to review documentation of investigations into the notebook problems, and the source said that documentation was supplied to Dell executives. The evidence, which included photographs of damaged notebooks, came to light in the wake of reports of one Dell notebook exploding in front of cameras during a conference in Japan.

Top Five Things Linux Can Learn from Microsoft

The Linux world's very own version of Paul Thurrot, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, lists 5 things Linux can learn from... Microsoft. "Linux does a lot of things right - open-source, security, reliability - but it's far from perfect. In fact, Linux and its vendors could stand to learn a few things from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft. Like what? Here's my list of the top five things that Linux could learn from Microsoft." Next thing you'll know we'll have Apple switching to Intel and... Oh, wait.

FreeBSD Core Team Election 2006: Results

The FreeBSD project has elected its new core team. "I am pleased to announce the results of the 2006 FreeBSD core team election. Congratulations to Wilko, George, Hiroki, Brooks and Giorgos who will be joining the core team, and of course to Robert, Warner, Murray and Wes who retain their seats. Our thanks also must go to Peter, John, Scott, Mark and Jun for all their hard work over the last two years."