OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Pane Relief: Registry Management Tools

Eugenia Loli 2006-02-12 Windows 18 Comments

The Windows registry works like an attic; stuff just keeps getting tossed in there, eventually creating a big, jumbled mess. Rick Cook explains why you need to pay attention to the registry and reviews types of registry tools for doing some spot cleaning.

Submitted by JustThinkIt 2006-02-12 Apple 37 Comments

"Most of the stuff written about Wozniak portrays him as an amiable buffoon. By most accounts, Woz is a talented engineer who got lucky in his early career and became fabulously wealthy. Then he dropped out to be an unsuccessful concert promoter, launch a couple of go-nowhere startups and teach school. It appears Woz has bounced from one thing to another without much commitment or direction. Along the way, he squandered much of his fortune and was a soft touch for every charity and cause under the sun."

Submitted by Alex Forster 2006-02-12 Windows 18 Comments

In a recent Channel 9 video, Scoble interviews Jenny Lam, creative lead on the Windows User Experience team. Lamb is responsible for everything from the new 'gem' start button to the latest bliss wallpapers. Some interesting bits: the GUI is finalized (are they sure this time?), Iconfactory is again designing the icons, and Photoshop and Illustrator are the tools of choice.

Surya: Addressing OpenSolaris IPv4 Scalability

Submitted by Robert Milkowski 2006-02-12 Solaris No Comments

"Surya project aims to improve IPv4 forwarding path scalability. Improving forwarding scalability enables a Solaris machine to forward a higher number of packets per second to a greater number of destinations described in the forwarding table. The project delivers a faster forwarding table lookup scheme and a streamlined IPv4 forwarding path. These improvements, when combined with soft-ring (PSARC 2005/654) and Crossbow's polling implementation, will vastly enhance Solaris forwarding throughput performance ."

Submitted by Eraser 2006-02-12 Java 36 Comments

"A few months ago OSNews reported that the next version of Java (code name 'Mustang') will feature native GTK components for the Swing API. This got us excited since, quite frankly, Swing's GTK look and feel has always been quite dissapointing. We downloaded the latest release candidate of JDK 1.6 to see how well the Swing GTK look and feel looks, we were quite pleased with what we found."

Submitted by misha 2006-02-11 Solaris 50 Comments

On Wednesday February 8th, the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board voted to approve The OpenSolaris Charter. Sun Microsystems also approved the Charter, and the document was signed by Glenn Weinberg, vice president of Sun's Operating Platforms Group.

Interview: Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva

Submitted by egan 2006-02-10 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 96 Comments

Mandriva's CEO got interviewed for the Mandriva club. "Right now, the new 'in thing' is Ubuntu. Of course, the situation is a bit different in this case: one person, with a quasi infinite check book is behind the operation. So they can give the system away and spend whatever is needed. Is this the right way for the open source eco-system? I find it hard to believe. One possible worse case scenario is that Ubuntu's plan is to use money to put all other community-based distros out of business and then start monetizing the installed base. If this were the case, they are doing the easy part: increasing their market share by giving away the product. We have found that the second part is a tad more difficult."

Submitted by Tyr. 2006-02-10 Apple 14 Comments

"Like most people that create networks I did not realize that the Mac Mini includes 3 high speed network interfaces and that with a little bit of work and the right architecture they can be used to operate in much the same manner one would see in a high-end network operations centers. I manage one such NOC and I wanted my home network to function like most companies who do serious business online."

One in Two PCs Won’t Run Vista’s 3D Interface

Submitted by Jeremy 2006-02-10 Windows 66 Comments

Roughly half of today's PCs won't be able to take advantage of the 'Aero Glass' compositor found within Microsoft's upcoming Vista software, due at the end of this year. The estimate was one of the conclusions cited in a report released late Thursday by Jon Peddie Research. The fault, Peddie reported, was that the low-cost integrated graphics controllers customers have chosen process the 2D windows of Windows XP and Windows 2000 just fine, but lack the bells and whistles necessary to process the Windows Desktop Compositing Engine used in Vista. About 63 percent of the 203 million PCs sold used an integrated graphics controller, JPR reported.

Review: LinuxOCE

Submitted by Uri Sharf 2006-02-10 Linux 2 Comments

Network install over LAN is an essential option for system administrators. Utilizing tools such as Kickstart or AutoYaST, they can create a single file containing the answers to all the questions that would normally be asked during a typical Linux installation, and use it to install the operating system and software on multiple machines. Based on this technology, LinuxCOE makes it possible to create an ISO image which can start an automated installation over the network. Read along for a review.

FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 and 5.5-BETA1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-10 FreeBSD 19 Comments

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the beginning of both the FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 release cycles with the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA1. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Please select a download mirror for downloading.

Elive 0.4-PRE Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-10 Linux 20 Comments

The Elive project has released what will probably become Elive 0.4. "Elive 0.4 will be officially released next week, but you can download and try the PRE release if you want, this PRE release will be just the same as 0.4 Release if there's no problems with it." Elive is the live CD which aims to bring the latest and greatest of E16/E17 to your desktop with minimum hassle. The default window manager is Enlightenment 16.8, but of course Enlightenment 17 is also included, as well as the EFL libraries and most of the applications made on top of these libraries.

Open-Source Advocates Ask for Patience in GPL 3 Debate

Thom Holwerda 2006-02-10 Open Source 11 Comments

Open-source code advocates are calling for cooler heads to prevail in the often-heated debate about many of the revised terms in the first discussion draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3 that was released in early January. While there are many opinions and questions about how the draft should be revised, there is one issue on which many in the free and open-source community agree: it is just too early in the process for people to take a definitive position on whether they can accepts its provisions.

Creating a Linux-Specific Hardware Vendor of Our Own

Submitted by Zeek Greko 2006-02-10 Linux 22 Comments

"The eWeek headline read 'Linux Desktop Needs Major Vendor Support.' A hopeful Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols opinion piece that someday, somewhere, some company will have the guts to face down Microsoft and make it possible for anyone and everyone to easily buy a GNU/Linux desktop. The 'some company' he was referring to was obviously the tier one vendors: IBM, HP, and Dell. While we're waiting for these tier ones to become so inclined, perhaps the GNU/Linux community's appropriate course of action should be to do what we should have done long ago. That is, to create a Linux-specific hardware vendor (or vendors) of our own."

Submitted by Shane 2006-02-10 Apple 23 Comments

Apple is handing out a MacBook Pro to each of the top twelve contributors to the open source WebKit project. Apple is also inviting five of them to this year's Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference, expenses paid by Apple. "WebKit is the system framework used on Mac OS X by Safari, Dashboard, Mail.app, and many other OS X applications. It is based on the KHTML engine from KDE."

Critical Patch Coming for Windows Media Player

Submitted by anonymous 2006-02-10 Microsoft No Comments

Microsoft said it will send out seven security bulletins on Tuesday as part of its regular monthly patching cycle. Four of the alerts are for problems with the Windows operating system, and another covers both Windows and Microsoft Office. The last two relate to Office and Windows Media Player respectively.

Remote Python Call

Submitted by ganges master 2006-02-10 General Development No Comments

Remote Python Call is a transparent infrastructure for RPC and distributed computing with the python language. It gives you complete and seamless control over a remote python interpreter and lets you execute code either synchronously or asynchronously (which means remote operations do not block and return AsyncResults). It is ideal for managing distributed tests on several platforms.

Documentation on GNU/Linux Available for Offline Use

Submitted by anonymous 2006-02-10 Linux 18 Comments

"What makes GNU/Linux such a pleasure to use is the excellent documentation that is included with it for each and every tool bundled with it. Just try learning to use iptables without reading the documentation even once, and you will get the idea. The documentation in Linux is available in a variety of formats - as man pages, info, HTML pages, postscript and in some cases even pdf. But not many people are aware that you can have additional documentation and even whole books available locally for making your GNU/Linux experience that much richer. Here are a few of them that have come to my notice."

Book Review: Practical Mono

Eugenia Loli 2006-02-09 Mono 11 Comments

Apress' open source series of books recently unveiled Mark Mamone's "Practical Mono", a book targetting new .NET developers. We take a quick look at the book below.

FOSDEM 2006 Approaching

Guest post by Jonita Prifti 2006-02-09 Open Source 4 Comments

FOSDEM 2006 is approaching. The event will take place on the 25th and 26th of February in Brussels, Belgium. The FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event for the community and organised by the community. FOSDEM 's goal is to provide free and open source developers and communities a place to go over the latest developments in the free and open source arena and to promote the development and the benefits of free and open source solutions. Read more for some interviews with key speakers at FOSDEM.