OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Red Hat Turns Over Testing Tools to Fedora – for Now

Submitted by Rahul 2006-06-02 Red Hat 2 Comments

The Dogtail and Autobuild automated certification and testing tools will be offered to customers as part of Fedora initially, but could become a commercial value-added service in the future, Red Hat's CEO said at a conference this week. Red Hat is on track to ship its Enterprise Linux 5 by the end of the year but certification, testing and standardizing the testing process have become more important to customers than the operating system, its CEO said.

Submitted by Yogurth 2006-06-02 Gnome 14 Comments

BetterDesktop has published its research results concerning ease of use and usability on GNOME. "Below are videos that we have taken of user tests. Please consider when watching the videos, that they may touch on many parts of the desktop. For example, a test that deals with changing the background may involve Nautilus or GNOME Control Center. In other words, there is a lot to learn from these videos! In addition to providing the videos, we have also aggregated some of the Data Results to see stats on specific tests. We have also created some Research Reports on this data."

Apple’s Struggles to Gain PC Market Share Continue

Thom Holwerda 2006-06-01 Apple 129 Comments

The popularity of Apple Computer's iPod digital music players is helping it sell more Macs, but so far it hasn't been enough to spark a rise in the company's share of the personal computer market. According to research firm Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totaled 57 million units in the first quarter of 2006, representing a 13.1 percent increase over the same period last year. But in that time, Apple's share of the worldwide market slipped from 2.2 percent to a mere 2.0 percent.

AMD Sets a Course for 2008

Thom Holwerda 2006-06-01 AMD 10 Comments

AMD on Thursday laid out plans to serve 30 percent of the market within the next two years, with new quad-core processor designs scheduled for 2007 and an acceleration of its manufacturing capabilities. The company also talked about plans to build future processors with the ability to mix and match the building blocks of a chip to cater to different needs, and to allow its partners to add co-processors that can link directly to Opteron processors through AMD's Hypertransport links.

Red Hat: Microsoft Still ‘Aggressive As Hell’

Thom Holwerda 2006-06-01 Red Hat 18 Comments

Three or four years ago, open-source providers enjoyed plenty of attention. But now some of the disruptive energy seems to have dropped away, as attention turns increasingly to the collaborative potential of the Web. Google and the buzzword du jour, Web 2.0, are capturing the attention once enjoyed by the struggle between Linux, Windows and Unix. ZDNet UK sat down with Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik at the company's user summit in Nashville for a brief discussion on how he intends to keep his company on the cutting edge and battle the biggest threats to its future success.

Submitted by Mitarai 2006-06-01 Multimedia, AV 10 Comments

Polypaudio is a relatively new cross-platform networked sound server project. The first release came out in July, 2004, the software has been released under the LGPL. "Polypaudio is a networked sound server for Linux and other Unix like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESOUND)." The main function of a sound server is to allow multiple audio applications to simultaneously share the same sound card, the networking capabilities extend this ability across machines.

Why First Generation Apple Products Suck

Submitted by Tom Dickens 2006-06-01 Apple 70 Comments

"It's not that I despise Apple or the wonderful products it showcases year after year, but the fact that almost every first generation Apple product has serious quality assurance issues bugs me beyond belief. Let's take a look at two of Apple's most successful products, the company's portable music player and its notebook series."

Submitted by mini-me 2006-06-01 Wireless 12 Comments

"I'm pleased to announce the release of Einstein Platform 2006.6 for MacOS X (PPC & Intel) and for arm-linux." And what exactly is it? "Einstein Platform is a way to transform a computer in a Newton device. It's NewtonOS taking over existing architectures." Basically, a Newton emulator.

Windows Server Virtualization Q&A

Submitted by Alessandro Perillih 2006-06-01 Windows 1 Comment

"Last week's announcement of Microsoft's new virtualization strategy at WinHEC 2006 conference brought in big interest. The importance of the announcement and the technical complexity of the products (the so-called Windows hypervisor will be integrated in the operating system itself) also raised customers' confusion, now trying to understand how the new products will address problems they today are solving with Virtual Server. Mike Neil, Virtual Machine Technologies Product Unit Manager at Microsoft, accepted to sit down with VirtualizationInfo and clarify some important points about Windows Server Virtualization, Virtual Machine Manager, the Softricity acquisition and more."

Submitted by falko 2006-06-01 Internet No Comments

"In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_cband on an Apache2 web server. mod_cband is an Apache 2 module which provides bandwidth quota and throttling. It solves the problem of limiting users' and virtualhosts' bandwidth usage. The current version can set virtualhosts' and users' bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultanous IP connections."

Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake Released

Adam Scheinberg 2006-06-01 Ubuntu 82 Comments

Dozens of readers submitted today's biggest news bugget: "Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, codenamed "Dapper Drake". This release includes both installable Desktop CDs and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures, for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu." For those who like the visuals, OSDir provides the fix. Update by TH: Instructions on installing this release on Apple's MacBook.

Windows Vista Beta 2 Reviews Trickling In

Submitted by Reindeer Flotilla 2006-06-01 Windows 23 Comments

The inevitable flood of Vista Beta 2 reviews are starting, and today there are two prominent reviews. Tom's Harware UK has spent 500 hours with Vista and given it a general thumbs up in its screenshot heavy review. Ars Technica also takes a look at the progress of Vista, but trivializes some larger Vista features, such as the completely rewritten Windows Mail.

Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails Released

Adam Scheinberg 2006-06-01 General Development 1 Comment

Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails is a set of tools that enables rapid building of Web applications with Ruby on Rails and DB2. It comes with a unique, one-click installer for pre-tested and reconfigured installation of not only Ruby and Rails, but a complete DB2 Express - C solution. Several Demos available showcasing the toolkit.

Microsoft to Rebuild Windows Graphics System

Submitted by Dan Warne 2006-06-01 Windows 32 Comments

Microsoft is to overhaul Windows' graphic driver model after realising that the one that will ship with Windows Vista - Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.0 - needs improvement in the way it shares GPU resources between programs and Windows itself.

KDE 3.5.3 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Reader 2006-06-01 KDE 18 Comments

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3. Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Significant enhancements include an improved startup time, speedups in KHTML, over 800 minor issues fixed, small new features and new translations.

Submitted by brewin 2006-05-31 AMD 49 Comments

AMD may be looking to buy graphics company ATI Technologies, a move that would benefit the overall graphics industry, according to RBC Capital Markets. "The synergies of this seem consistent with the recent announcements by AMD to significantly increase capacity over the next few-years," wrote analyst Apjit Walia in a note to investors Wednesday. "We believe ATI is a rare-buy in the semiconductor space right now given the near-term tie-up dynamics."

OpenSUSE 10.1 Is Versatile, But Uneven

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-31 SuSE, openSUSE 15 Comments

Novell's OpenSUSE 10.1 is a solid, multipurpose Linux-based operating system that - in addition to being a very good distribution in its own right - offers an early peek at the SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop product that Novell is set to ship this summer. What has always (and still does) set SUSE apart is the measure of management homogeneity that the distribution brings to this diverse set of components - mostly through its Yast system configuration framework. Overall, eWEEK Labs appreciated the ambitious scope of OpenSUSE 10.1's configuration tools, but we also ran into some areas in which Yast's reach frustratingly exceeded its grasp.

Sun Releases Fire 5000 Plan

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-31 Oracle and SUN 17 Comments

Sun Microsystems will fire up to 5000 workers this year, as the company tries to cut costs and make it easier to post quarterly profits. All told, Sun expects to cleave off between 11 per cent and 13 per cent of its 37500 person workforce. The firings mark the first mass layoff to take place under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has historically been reluctant to let go of staff, despite Wall Street's constant calls to trim costs via layoffs. CNet has more.

Firefox 2.0 Alpha 3 Released, Including Google Security Features

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-31 Mozilla, Gecko 23 Comments

"The next version of Firefox will come out of the virtual box with Google's anti-phishing tools built in. While the Googlified security services have been available through use of the Google Toolbar for either Firefox or IE6 for quite some time already, this marks the first default installation. And we all know how much Google values the defaults."

UK Firm To Unveil Wall-Socket PC

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-31 Hardware 16 Comments

Newcastle-based Jade Integration will launch one of the smallest thin-client computers available in the UK to date, the Jack PC, next month. Containing all the electronics needed to run as a low- to medium-power PC, the Jack PC, as its name suggests, will fit into a standard size wall socket. The entire PC sits on two layered circuitboards. It contains an AMD RISC processor to help reduce power consumption and heat output. The Jack PC thin client fits into a wall socket and is so energy-efficient it can get its power over Ethernet.