OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Speed up Ruby-on-Rails with memcached

Submitted by fak3r 2006-05-18 General Development No Comments

"Today I learned about memcached, which I'd heard of before, but never really investigated. From the project's site, 'memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.' So, even though I don't have a huge amount of traffic, I still have dynamic sites, and I'm always looking at ways to speed up my Typo blog. So, using memcached, you can get a big performance boost in databases calls, which sold me on giving it a go."

PC-BSD 1.0 Review

Eugenia Loli 2006-05-18 PC-BSD 20 Comments

"PC-BSD aims to be an easy to use desktop operating system, based on FreeBSD. As many Linux users, I have little or no knowledge about FreeBSD. I heard many rumors about it. I read about it and about its history. I even tried it a little while ago and, although I appreciated some aspects of it, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't ready for the desktop. So when I read the announcement of PC-BSD being released, I decided to have a look at it." Read the review at LinuxForums.

Submitted by jeanmarc 2006-05-17 macOS 176 Comments

"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system. Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."

Submitted by Robert Escue 2006-05-17 Ubuntu 45 Comments

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the ~~fork~~ ~~work~~ that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." More here, while a comparison of Linux and Solaris on a T2000 is also available.

Submitted by jfpoole 2006-05-17 Apple 10 Comments

Geek Patrol benchmarks the MacBook against the MacBook Pro, and concludes: "The difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro varies between 75% and 115%; sometimes the MacBook is faster, sometimes the MacBook Pro is faster. For CPU-intensive tasks, I doubt most will notice the difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, Geekbench doesn’t measure GPU performance, which is the biggest difference between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. For GPU-intensive tasks, most users will probably prefer the dedicated GPU in the MacBook Pro over the integrated GPU in the MacBook."

Xfree 4.6.0 Released

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-05-17 Wayland 40 Comments

Xfree 4.6.0 has been released. New features include security updates, driver updates and fixes, input driver enhancements, Xinerama improvements, and much more. Read the release notes, readme, and installation notes.

Nested Archive Toolkit for Java

Submitted by anonymous 2006-05-17 Java 1 Comment

Nested Archive Toolkit for Java is a tool that provides the layout details of archives, including nested or J2EE archives, so that users can efficiently open and update selected archive contents. This technology builds on existing Java APIs for accessing ZIP and JAR files and uses advanced techniques for opening and scanning nested archives.

Nokia Announces the Internet Tablet 2006 OS Update

Eugenia Loli 2006-05-17 Wireless 26 Comments

As promised, Nokia announces today the 2006 OS update for the 770 Internet Tablet adding Google Talk, a full screen finger keyboard, improved memory performance, and new refreshed look. Additional applets have also been added for faster access to internet services.

Researcher: Macs Not As Expensive as Thought

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-16 Apple 90 Comments

"Although Apple's machines are more expensive than PCs, one Wall Street researcher says the price of a Mac isn't that much more than a comparable Windows-based computer. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said that his research shows an average price difference of only 13 percent for desktops and 10 percent for laptops, once you factor in the same components that Apple uses." Run, Forrest, run!

FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-16 FreeBSD 13 Comments

"FreeBSD 5.5-RC1 is now available for testing. Things had been going well with the 5.5 BETAs up to the point we suspended making them so we could focus on the balance of the 6.1 release so we think 5.5 is pretty much ready to go. Unless big problems are reported with this RC we will start the 5.5 release builds this coming weekend and do the release early next week."

AMD Unveils ‘Next Gen’ CPU Plans

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-16 AMD 36 Comments

AMD confirmed details of its "Next Generation Processor Technology" today, but it's really business as usual for the company. As AMD heads to four-core country, the company will continue to improve the bandwidth of its processor package, tweak memory and rely on help from partners to compete with an upcoming line of revamped chips from Intel.

Sony Revives Mini PC Line for UMPC Era

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-16 Hardware 5 Comments

Sony will ship its Vaio UX UMPC on 27 May, the consumer electronics giant said today. The successor to the company's U series of handheld mini PCs will ship as the retail-oriented UX-50 and as the Sony-sold UX-90S and UX-90PS. As expected, the UX-50 will contain a 1.06GHz ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo U1300 processor backed by 512MB of 400MHz SDRAM and a 30GB, 4,200rpm hard disk. The unit's display is a 4.5in, 1,024 x 600 panel driven by Intel's integrated GMA950 GPU - the chipset's a 945GMS. The handheld PC runs Windows XP Home Edition. Connectivity comes courtesy of Bluetooth 2 and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. There's an integrated webcam and a fingerprint sensor.

Submitted by adstro 2006-05-16 Java 71 Comments

"Sun today announced that Java Platform, Standard Edition 5 is now available for redistribution by GNU/Linux and OpenSolaris operating system distributors under the new Operating System Distributor's License for Java (also known as the 'Distro License for Java' or DLJ). Developed in consultation with, and for use by, the various GNU/Linux communities, the new license allows distributors to ship Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit and Java Runtime Environment as installable packages for their operating systems." At the same time, Sun also promised to open-source Java.

Submitted by chrishaney 2006-05-16 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 15 Comments

According to this blog entry by Warly Done, the ISO images of Mandriva One 2006 have been released to public mirrors: "Push Mandriva One final ISO on public FTP mirrors. They include all the updates and the latest kernel 2.6.12." Screenshot tour available, boys and girls, so rejoice. That's an order.

Haiku Gets OpenGL, DVB-T

Submitted by Esox 2006-05-16 Haiku 21 Comments

IsComputerOn reports that Haiku now has OpenGL and DVB-T support. You will need Rudolph's drivers for it to work, naturally. IsComputerOn has more information and screenshots. "And the icing on the cake... Quake 3 also runs on Haiku in OGL! As you can see from the screenshots here and here over at 's Flickr page."

Submitted by alcibiades 2006-05-16 Linux 19 Comments

"I've been a Linux diehard since my early days with Debian 1.3. I visited various RPM distributions, including Red Hat, Mandrake, and SUSE, flirted with Gentoo, and jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but I could never find a single place to settle - until I tried Arch Linux."

UndoDB Released

Submitted by Julian Smith 2006-05-16 General Development 12 Comments

"Undo Software today unveiled UndoDB - the first bidirectional debugger for compiled programs. A bidirectional debugger allows programmers to run a program backwards in time as well as forwards. The program can be stepped back line-by-line, or rewound to any point in its history. Furthermore, programmers can play the program forwards and backwards in a totally repeatable fashion, allowing them to 'home in' on the cause of a bug."

Apple Releases MacBook

Submitted by Michael Zandstra 2006-05-16 Apple 89 Comments

Apple has released the long-awaited and seriously overdue replacement for its iBook consumer laptop product line. Dubbed the MacBook, it comes with an Intel Core Duo processor (1.83 or 2.0Ghz), 13.3" widescreen display, 512MB RAM, and an Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics card. It comes in white and black. In the US, you'll pay $1099 for the cheapest model, in the UK GBP 749, and on Europe's mainland EUR 1079 (mainland price taken from Apple Germany, may differ per country). Update: Between all the MacBook talk, Apple also upgraded its MacBook Pro product line. Besides a minor speed bump, Apple added, as a free option, the glossy screen stuff.

GNU Classpath 0.91 Released

Submitted by Robert Schuster 2006-05-16 Java 7 Comments

"The GNU Classpath team would like to announce the release of version 0.91 of their Free class library for the Java programming language. In the last 10 weeks the project implemented the Java Printing API based on CUPS, finished an 'Ocean' theme similar to the one available in version 5.0 of Sun's Java2 Standard Edition runtime, implemented the APIs for UI accessibility features, and updated many parts of the class library documentation. The latter was done by David Gilbert of JFreeChart, who takes part in the GNU project and gave a demostration (.odp|.pdf) at FOSDEM 2006 showing that JFreeChart is able to run on 100% Free software (Cairo + JamVM + GNU Classpath)."

Good Person, Bad Person

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-15 Open Source 89 Comments

"I also don't have a lot of interest in being a good person or bad person, from what I can tell either way you are screwed." This is what Georgia Lass, lead character of my favourite television production "Dead Like Me", says, when she introduces herself in the pilot episode. I cannot speak for the developers behind the Kororaa Xgl live CD, but I'd think Georgia nailed the situation they must be in pretty well. Note: this is the Mon... Err, Sunday Eve Column. My apologies for the delay, but I was... Incapacitated yesterday eve.