SUSE Co-Founder Leaves Novell

Suse co-founder and kernel team member Hubert Mantel has resigned from Novell, the server software company that acquired the German Linux company in 2004. Mantel announced the move on a Suse Linux mailing list Tuesday, and Novell confirmed the move Wednesday. "I just decided to leave Suse/Novell. This is not (any) longer the company I founded 13 years ago," Mantel said in the e-mail. "I have been the maintainer of the Suse kernel for more than a decade now. I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly."

Apple Mac OS X on x86: a First Test

ZDnet has installed the x86 version of Mac OS X and did some preliminary tests. Their conclusion? "Mac OS X looks in amazingly good early form on the x86 platform. As far as power consumption and OS performance are concerned, it can already keep up with Windows XP. Application performance clearly lags behind, though, and still needs to improve." Now, let's wait and see if Apple dares to send angry letters to ZDnet too.

‘Unix Beats Windows’ – Says Microsoft!

"Ok, that headline may be a bit overblown - but Microsoft Research has released part of a report on the Singularity kernel they've been working on as part of their planned shift to network computing. The report includes some performance comparisons that show Singularity beating everything else on a 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon-based machine. What's noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants."

How NetBSD Uses Their Donations

As reported previously, the NetBSD Foundation made a call for donations a few months ago. This was widely publicized, and the open source community responded generously, donating almost $30000,- (E25500,-). As also previously noted, this money was earmarked for specific purchases, and the NetBSD Project would like to let its users know what in particular was bought from these donations. Please see Thor Lancelot Simons detailed summary for information regarding what was bought, the current status and a long list of people that made all this possible.

Gates Warns of ‘Sea Change’ in Memo

In an e-mail to top executives, Gates urged company leaders to "act quickly and decisively" to move further into the field of offering such services, in order to best formidable competitors. But he also warned that the company must be thoughtful in building the right technology to serve the right audience. "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive," Gates wrote. "We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us - still, the opportunity to lead is very clear."

Solaris Desktop Gap Analysis

"The purpose of this document is to detail proposed projects and direction based on an analysis of the existing desktops on Solaris and Linux, but with input from MS Windows and Mac OS/X also being taken into account. Post Solaris 10 a significant effort is being put into making Solaris simple for everyone (not just sys-admins), and this is being done from the ground up. The Keep it Simple Solaris (KiSS) project is at the heart of this."

Apple Patent Shows Company Possibly Preparing for OS War

The big news the discovery of an Apple patent that allows the computer maker to protect the installation of Mac OS X. In this case, really limit it to just Apple-produced hardware. However, the patent describes a process whereby users would be able to load one of three operating systems as their primary OS and then load a secondary operating system as their secondary OS.

IBM Releases Cell BE Technology

The Cell Broadband Engine is a breakthrough microprocessor with unique capabilities for applications requiring video, 3D graphics, or high-performance computation for imaging, security, visualization, healthcare, surveillance and more. The following technologies are from the CBE Software Development Kit v1.0 that provides everything Cell software developers need to create, build, simulate, and test Cell applications.

The Case for a Proper, Unified RISC OS Formatter

As highlighted by a recent usenet post, specific formatters are needed for each hardware interface (of which there are many for RiscPCs, and several for Iyonixes), despite the fact that the specific Filecore format (the native RISC OS filesystem) is essentially laid out exactly the same on each. This article examines the problems with this approach and a possible solution.

Apple’s Mac OS Killer in 1996

Before Apple acquired NeXT for its NeXTStep operating system, it was working on a modern operating system of its own. Named after the popular American composer, Aaron Copland, the OS was a complete rewrite of the existing Mac OS that supported multitasking, protected memory and a brand new look that would eventually be rolled into Mac OS 8 as Platinum. The project stagnated under the leadership of Gil Amelio, and was canceled after it became clear it could not be completed. Read the story at Low End Mac.

Interview: Bob Young After Red Hat

Bob Young is, arguably, one of the most influential figures in the development of Linux and open source. By co-founding Red Hat with Mark Ewing in 1993, Young helped turn Linux into a household name (although himself uses Mac OS X). After being involved with Red Hat for more than 12 years, Young recently stepped down from Red Hat's board of directors. NewsForge caught up with him to see what his plans are, and what his thoughts are on Red Hat and the future of open source.

Review: FreeBSD 6.0

"The FreeBSD operating system is finally through it's buggy 5.x series and into the more reliable 6.x series. Most of the problems of the old days - kernel panics on multi-CPU machines, AMD64 troubles galore, and shaky network drivers - are gone. FreeBSD still isn't perfect, but at least with 6.0-RELEASE it's more stable and functional than it has been in the recent past."

Formation of KDE Marketing Working Group

The KDE Marketing Working Group has formed, after being proposed by the KDE community at aKademy 2005, with the aim of improving KDE's marketing and promotion efforts. Martijn Klingens, Sebastian Kügler and Wade Olson will be taking the lead in coordinating and implementing new practices, such as promoting releases more widely and running more exciting events booths.