OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Review: Gentoo Linux

Submitted by anonymous 2006-01-19 Linux 55 Comments

LinuxHelp reviewed Gentoo, and in spite of being a lot of work to set up, Gentoo offers something unique few other distributions are able to offer:"One thing I found unique to Gentoo was the knowledge gained by the user in the process of installing it on the hard disk. And if you are an experienced Linux user/administrator, it will be a revision time well spent."

Open Source Waits for a Xen Moment in 2006

Submitted by Jane Walker 2006-01-19 OS News 10 Comments

"In the past month, there's been much ado about Xen in the online community, both from developers, columnists and the SearchOpenSource.com audience at large. First Xen was given the green light to become an open source killer app, thanks to the work done by companies like XenSource with its XenOptimizer 3.0 upgrade. Meanwhile, some users and analysts said the technology was unproven and had a ways to go before the killer app label would fit."

Submitted by jonobacon 2006-01-19 Open Source 40 Comments

"When I first got into open source many moons ago, the advocacy movement was a thriving and vocal part of the community. Most of the movers and shakers back in the day were advocating the use of free and open software at work, to their friends and to their local community via LUGs and other groups. Back then, advocacy was a key part of the community, not only in showing existing computer users this alternative software, but also advising disadvantaged people for whom free software could really open up the doors to skill, employment and potential. Recently it seems this community-driven advocacy effort has petered out somewhat, and there are far fewer people talking about, conducting, exploring, refining and pushing open aource advocacy."

Intel-Based iMacs Are Fast, But Gains Don’t Match Apple’s Claims

Submitted by Richard Levangie 2006-01-19 Apple 61 Comments

"Since the first rumors of an Apple switch to Intel, everyone has been wondering about the potential speed of Intel-based Macs. Last week's announcement of the first shipping Intel-based Macs brought with it the promise of a major speed boost: Apple's Web pages suggest that the new iMac, powered by the Intel Core Duo processor, is twice as fast as its G5 predecessor. Macworld Lab's tests do show that the new Intel-based iMac is faster than the iMac G5 when running native applications. However, we found that those improvements are generally much less than what Apple claims is a 2x improvement in speed."

Submitted by danq 2006-01-19 OS News 30 Comments

GNU/DOS 2006, the latest version of the FreeDOS distribution, has been released. New features include an easy installation/upgrade, package management utilities, the MTXE screen saver, Arachne GPL version 1.89, OpenGEM Release 5, vim 6.4, and other updates. Download it here.

Four Ways To Boost Socket Performance on Linux

Submitted by anonymous 2006-01-19 Linux 5 Comments

"The sockets API lets you develop client and server applications that can communicate across a local network or across the world via the Internet. Like any API, you can use the sockets API in ways that promote high performance - or inhibit it. This article explores four ways to use the sockets API to squeeze the greatest performance out your application and to tune the GNU/Linux environment to achieve the best results."

Apple Posts USD 565/EUR 468 Million Profit

Submitted by Richard Levangie 2006-01-19 Apple 9 Comments

On the strength of higher iPod and Macintosh sales, Apple on Wednesday posted a profit of $565 million for its fiscal 2006 first quarter. Picking up from where it left off last year, Apple once again reported the highest revenue and earnings in the company's history. These results compare to revenue of $3.49 billion and a net profit of $295 million . Apple said that international sales accounted for 40 percent of the quarter's revenue. Apple shipped over 1.2 million Macs and more than 14 million iPods during the quarter. This represents a 20 percent growth in Macs and a 207 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.

Linux Users May Be Violating Sarbanes-Oxley

Submitted by Jack 2006-01-19 Linux 50 Comments

"Companies using Linux for embedded applications may be unwittingly violating the Linux license and even breaking federal securities laws, according to a research published by Wasabi Systems. According to the study, the problem lies with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that companies disclose ownership of intellectual property to their shareholders. The study indicates that dozens of companies are discovered each year to have violated the terms of GPL, and if they are public companies, they are violating Sarbanes-Oxley."

Digital Television: Making Sense of it All

Eugenia Loli 2006-01-19 Multimedia, AV 9 Comments

Engadget has two great articles (Part I & Part II) on Digital Television (mobile and normal). However, if all these new standards and acronyms were not enough, Sprint is trying to push one more on us.

A Quick Review of DragonFly BSD 1.4

Guest post by Trent Townsend 2006-01-18 BSD & Darwin 29 Comments

DragonFly BSD 1.4 is the third major release of Matthew Dillon's fork of the FreeBSD operating system, and significant progress has been made towards reaching many of the project's numerous goals. New in this release include a more up to date version of the GNU Compiler Collection (required due to the incread use of thread local storage in DragonFly), an import of NetBSD's Citrus code (Comprehensive I18N Framework Towards Respectable Unix Systems), major reworking of all core subsystems in preparation for removing the MP lock, rewrites of various VFS related code and many updated drivers, frameworks and contributed programs.

Submitted by fylfot 2006-01-18 RISC OS 16 Comments

"Imagine the following situation: a collection of computer users draw up a wishlist of software they'd really like to see developed. These end users then begin to donate money to projects that they'd individually like to see appear. A programmer then goes about creating an item from the list that has donations attached to it. Once the project is complete and enough money has been raised, the author can collect the cash and release the software. Finished code is withheld until enough money has been donated. It's worked for other operating systems, but can it work for RISC OS?"

AJAX Design Patterns for Web Services

Submitted by anonymous 2006-01-18 General Development 5 Comments

"This article shows you how to implement a Web browser-based SOAP Web services client using Ajax design patterns. In the Part 1 of this series, the author introduced a simple Web browser-based JavaScript library for invoking SOAP Web services using AJAX. In the discussion that follows, the author expands on functions of that JavaScript library by implementing basic support for the Web Services."

Microsoft Releases Key Vista Developer Technologies

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-18 Windows 2 Comments

Microsoft on Wednesday gave developers access to a key piece of Windows Vista, months ahead of the operating system's release. The company posted near-final versions of two software development technologies that are part of WinFX, the underlying programming model being introduced with Vista, which is slated to ship late this year. The release is "a significant checkpoint" on the road toward delivery of the company's new programming model since it allows developers to build and deploy applications on their core production systems, according to Ari Bixhorn, director of Web services strategy at Microsoft.

Intel Claims Itanium Eating RISC Competitors

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-18 Intel 23 Comments

The VP of Intel's digital enterprises group told the INQ this morning that the Itanium microprocessor is starting to make waves in the corporate enterprise market. Kirk Skaugen, of the servers platform group, showed a slide which claimed the Itanium processor was eating into Sun and IBM Power shares, based on "customer revenues". He also said that since the fourth quarter of 2003, applications for the Itanium family had grown to 5900 by the end of 2005.

Mini Review: FreeBSD 6.0

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-18 FreeBSD 60 Comments

"For software that's been around since the late '70s, before any of today's more popular operating systems, open source BSDs (in their current avatars) don't get their due share of hard disks. FreeBSD, one of the first BSD flavors to emerge from the 386BSD project, is a Unix-like free operating system based originally on the BSD branch of 386BSD and later 4.4BSD-Lite. This makes BSDs more like traditional Unixes than Linux. Late last year FreeBSD unleashed release 6.0, with better support for 64-bit and wireless hardware. Here's our review."

Corel Launches Office Upgrades

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-18 Office 14 Comments

Corel is targeting disaffected Microsoft customers with discounted 'upgrade' offers for those who switch to the new WordPerfect Office X3. Corel on Tuesday announced an updated version of WordPerfect Office, its rival to Microsoft's dominant Office suite. The new program adds the ability to import and export its files to Adobe's PDF. The software also has a new interface and promises better support for multilingual characters and an easy way to strip out metadata from a file. ZDNet has a review too.

Details on Intel’s Beta Mac Development Tools

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-18 Apple 10 Comments

Intel has released betas of its software development tools for Mac OS X running on the Intel architecture. The tools consist of a Fortran and C++ compilers, a math kernel library and a performance primitives library. The tools are specifically designed to support Intel's Core Duo dual-core processor, as found in all the new Macs. The toolchain integrates into Apple's Xcode IDE, meaning the Intel compilers can be used in the production of Universal Binaries--applications packaged with code for both Power and Intel architecture machines.

Reggae Release B Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-18 Morphos 2 Comments

Reggae Release B has been released. "Reggae is a new approach to media streams processing in MorphOS operating system. Now MOS media library has the stabilized API and entered public beta stage. Unlike old datatypes system, Reggae has full support of streaming and is highly modularized. Streaming support means that media stream is not buffered in the memory as the whole. Small portions of data are passed through a chain of connected objects (called a pipeline). This way the library can deal with extremely big media objects (or continuous streams) keeping memory footprint low."

Mandriva, HP To Ship Linux PCs in Latin America

Submitted by Vautnavette 2006-01-18 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 17 Comments

"Mandriva today announced a new partnership with HP to distribute HP computers pre-loaded with Mandriva Linux 2006 to 37 countries in Latin America. As part of the agreement, Mandriva has been named the 'Preferred Linux Partner for Latin America' and Mandriva Linux 2006 has been optimized and certified for HP machines. The companies will work together on sales, support and marketing in all Latin American territories, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico."

Learning Monad, the Scripting Language for Windows Vista

Submitted by Anonymous 2006-01-18 Windows 35 Comments

"Monad, also known more formally as the MSH Command Shell, is a next generation Windows command shell. Built on top of the .NET Framework, MSH provides a powerful infrastructure for the automation of a wide range of administrative tasks. At last, the command line is a first-class citizen in the world of Windows system management."