OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

RiscPC Emulator Ported to Linux

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-16 RISC OS No Comments

Freely available RiscPC hardware emulator RPCEmu has been ported to Linux. Author Tom Walker released his program under an open source licence to Peter Naulls, who then crafted a Linux version and added in HostFS support from ArcEm - enabling RPCEmu to access files stored by the host operating system. RPCEmu, originally built for Windows users, is distributed with its source code included for other programmers to tweak and experiment with.

OpenSUSE 10.1 Beta 8 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-16 SuSE, openSUSE 16 Comments

The 8th beta of OpenSUSE 10.1 has been released today. As has become common now, the OpenSUSE team did not post any changelog, sadly. There's a list of most annoying bugs, and the download locations are listed inside the release announcement.

Submitted by Valour 2006-03-16 General Development 119 Comments

"There are several possible reasons why you might choose to use the command line interface as your desktop environment. For one thing, it uses less electricity, so you could maximize battery life on your laptop computer. Secondly, it forces you to think about your operating system and directory structure in a totally different way than a GUI does; this could greatly enhance your understanding of GNU/Linux and cause you to be more creative in your technological problem solving. And thirdly, everyone will think you're a supreme computer genius for ditching X11 for the CLI. People passing by your desk will think you're some kind of computer god. Who doesn't want that?"

How to Develop for the Ultra Mobile PC

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-16 Wireless No Comments

"Hey, have you been thinking about developing for Microsoft's new form factor PC called the Ultra Mobile PC aka Origami, but don't know where to go? As I mentioned in the meeting last night, the folks over at MSDN have got some great information here and they even have an emulator to get you started on your way to tailor your apps to the 7" UMPC interface."

FreeDarwin Pre-Release 1 Released

Submitted by anonymous 2006-03-16 BSD & Darwin 11 Comments

FreeDarwin is a project started to create a BSD-like OS based on Apple Darwin. It uses the NetBSD pkgsrc system, and hopes to replace the DarwinBuild build system with a BSD like build system for the base system, as well as replace many of the Apple and GNU userland tools with BSD userland tools. The first pre-release was released today.

Submitted by Nicholas Blachford 2006-03-16 3D 14 Comments

"3D acceleration is a long established standard part of today’s systems yet it started life as an exotic, expensive add on. Last year Ageia announced a new kind of add on, their PhysX chip is a new technology specifically designed for accelerating physics processing in games. Why should a physics chip interest gamers? What does it do? How does it work?"

Submitted by Pseudo Cyborg 2006-03-16 Apple 61 Comments

As we reported a few days ago, the Windows XP on Mac contest has been won by 'narf2006'. The contest website says that a solution has been found and tested to work. A video of Windows XP booting can also be found.

Two Interface Designers Talk OS X, XP/Vista

Submitted by Pierre Grabolosa 2006-03-16 Graphics 14 Comments

Two former user interface designers at Apple and Microsoft - now co-workers at Frog Design - come together to discuss the design considerations that have gone into Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.

Analysis of .NET Use in Longhorn, Vista

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-16 .NET 34 Comments

This article presents results of an investigation of the usage of .NET on five versions of Windows. The operating system files for the first version of Windows tested, XP Pro with Service Pack 2 applied, did not use .NET at all. This is understandable because XP was released before .NET was first released. The next version of Windows was the PDC 2003 build of Longhorn. This has a similar number of unmanaged executable files as XPSP2 but it also had thirty five .NET assemblies. Amongst these assemblies were two services.

GNOME 2.14.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-16 Gnome 54 Comments

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.14, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform Free desktop environment. Foresight Linux 0.9.4 was first to incorporate GNOME 2.14 on their distribution, VMWare and Qemu images are already available in addition to their normal distribution.

Microsoft’s Hilf Says Windows More Reliable Than Linux

Submitted by Not_My_Real_Name 2006-03-16 Windows 105 Comments

The director of platform strategy at Microsoft, Bill Hilf has lead the Linux and open source software technology group at Redmond for the past two years and formerly headed the global Linux technical strategy of IBM. He says reliability and predicability are the key factors which give Microsoft’s software the edge over Linux and open source alternatives.

BSD Podcasts Available

Submitted by Nix_User 2006-03-16 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

Ever get tired of reading your news about BSD? Try BSDTalk then. So far they got about 20/10 minute podcasts regarding BSD related news and info.

Submitted by netpython 2006-03-16 Ubuntu 6 Comments

Sometimes an app isn't there for your architecture. This happens now and then for AMD64. It can be handy to chroot into x86 and symlink to the x86 app afterwards. Also, despite Ubuntu's stability, catastrophic failures do happen, and when they do it is important to have a backup so that your data can be recovered. This HowTo goes over creating an image of your installation so that you can restore your system if needed with all the programs and updates already installed. Elsewhere, Kubuntu Flight 5 was released.

MorphOS Gets a Package Manager

Submitted by Masterjack 2006-03-16 Morphos No Comments

MorphUP, the packet manager for MorphOS has been released after six months of development. There is currently no central repository, but one can generate and host own packages on any http-server.

Setting up a Subversion Server Under Windows

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-15 General Development 11 Comments

Team System posted a tutorial on how to install and configure Subversion under Windows, while this article describes how to create both the repository and your projects while running on Windows or Linux.

FreeBSD 6.1-BETA-4, 5.5-BETA-4 Released

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-15 FreeBSD 7 Comments

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA4 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA4. A couple of significant changes were made to 6.1-BETA4. First is a large set of fixes to the VFS layer and various filesystems that should significantly help performance under heavy load and also fix problems with forcefully unmounting these filesystems. The second large change is that sysinstall will now install both the GENERIC and SMP kernels and automatically select the appropriate one based on whether it detects one CPU in the system or multiple CPUs.

Interview: the Men of Mono

Submitted by M-Saunders 2006-03-15 Mono 20 Comments

What makes a Mono developer tick? Linux format has a brief interview with Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, two prominent Mono coders who've just written a book on the open source .NET implementation. They explain the advantages of C# over other languages, and give a bit of advice for budding Mono app developers.

FC5 Preview, OLPC Project & Optimization Work

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-15 Fedora Core 5 Comments

"The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest programs. Fedora Core 5 (FC5) is slated for release next week." Read more of the preview here. Elsewhere, Christopher Blizzard of Red Hat blogs about modifying Fedora to fit into the OLPC project needs and the optimization work being done on Fedora as a result of it using Red Hat open sourced tools like Dogtail.

Five Reasons Why you Should Never Use PostgreSQL — Ever

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-15 Databases 25 Comments

"Within the past two years, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have all released freely available versions of their flagship database servers, a move that would have been unheard of just a few years ago. While their respective representatives would argue the move was made in order to better accommodate the needs of all users, it's fairly clear that continued pressure from open source alternatives such as MySQL and PostgreSQL have caused these database juggernauts to rethink their strategies within this increasingly competitive market."

Submitted by JCooper 2006-03-15 Gnome 40 Comments

"In the GNOME philosophy, we want applications that do their job, only their job, and we want those to do it perfectly. Epiphany's job is to browse the web. Only browsing the web. But browsing the web in a GNOME fashioned way." Read more here and also here.