OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Interview: Corel on Sun, Open Standards

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-19 Office 36 Comments

Corel's Richard Carriere recently sat down with BetaNews to discuss the hype around alternative office suites and the future of WordPerfect. Carriere says the market is ready for an MS Office alternative, that Microsoft doesn't innovate, and OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument format aren't yet viable.

Microsoft Slashes Shared Source Licenses

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-19 Microsoft 15 Comments

Microsoft is slashing the number of licenses it will use for its Shared Source Initiative from now on, while at the same time radically shortening and simplifying the text of those licenses. The move, which will be announced on Wednesday morning at Oscon, the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam, will see Microsoft cutting back the more than 10 Shared Source licenses that currently exist to only three template, or core, licenses.

Miray To Show µnOS Running on Genesi’s ODW

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-19 OS News 11 Comments

Miray has announced to show their realtime OS µnOS ('mu-nano-OS') running on Genesi's Open Desktop Workstation at the Systems 2005 fair for IT specialists in Munich, Germany. From the mission statement of this microkernel OS: "It is the goal to make µnOS available to the largest number of hardware platforms. A portable, scalable and real-time capable architecture should be delivered, which should make possible the usage of µnOS in embedded systems as well as in desktop computers up to servers."

Internet, Blogging Predicted by 19th Century Russian Prince

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-19 Internet 58 Comments

"Ask a Russian where television, fashion shows, hip-hop or hieroglyphs were invented and you will no doubt hear - in Russia. Believing in the Russian genius is an essential feature of the Russian mentality. That is why no Russian was surprised when we found out with the help of Lenta.ru the Internet in general, and blogging in particular, was, if not invented, at least predicted by a Russian back in 1837."

Review: Windows Vista Build 5231

Submitted by Sujhsta Shah 2005-10-19 Windows 23 Comments

"Microsoft is right on schedule with this month's Windows Vista CTP. We had to really pull some strings to get this release slightly ahead of schedule, but we managed it and it's our pleasure to bring you our initial analysis of the new build, titled 5231. It's becoming clear that Microsoft is serious about Vista, as it keeps getting better with every CTP release."

The BSD-HALO Project

Submitted by Big Richard 2005-10-19 FreeBSD 24 Comments

A rather ambitious new FreeBSD-derived distribution called BSD-HALO is currently in the planning and proof of concept stages. Amongst other things, one of the biggest goals is to attempt to produce a virus, malware, and exploit resistant environment. UI will also be a major design factor, and some pre-alpha screenshots can be viewed on the site as well.

Submitted by anyweb 2005-10-19 SuSE, openSUSE 14 Comments

"SUSE Linux OSS 10, is a mixed bag of emotions. I'm very happy that power management has improved but at the same time I'm disappointed with the lousy wireless support (centrino 2200bg) and I'm also disappointed with the incorrect video resolution." In addition, here's an article on how to setup SmartPM for SUSE.

OpenPKG 2.5 Released for 19 Unix Platforms

Submitted by Ralf S. Engelschall 2005-10-19 Unix 4 Comments

The OpenPKG project released version 2.5 of their cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. All software is carefully packaged for easy deployment on 19 different Unix platforms, including FreeBSD 4.11/5.4/6.0/7.0, NetBSD 2.0.2, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core 4, SUSE Linux 9.3/10.0, Mandriva Linux 10.2 and Sun Solaris 8/9/10. The major technical efforts for this release were spent on migrating to GCC 4.0, further improving the Solaris 10, FreeBSD 6.0 and SUSE 10.0 support.

Please Fill Out Our Reader Survey

David Adams 2005-10-19 OS News 79 Comments

Our short survey will take about two minutes to complete, and one survey respondent will win an iPod Nano for his or her trouble. Start here.

Submitted by dbprice 2005-10-18 Solaris 14 Comments

Solaris Express 10/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 23) was posted today, providing a variety of improvements. And for the first time, gdb and g77 are bundled with the operating system. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

1000 Applications at GnomeFiles.org

Eugenia Loli 2005-10-18 GTK+ 55 Comments

GnomeFiles.org (OSNews' sister site & GTK+ software repository) is celebrating 1000 applications added to its database. Since GnomeFiles' launch 1.5 years ago the site grew enormously and it now serves more than 22,000 web pages per day on average and it includes a recently improved version for mobile browsers (optimized for PDAs & smartphones, plain phones should be using its WAP version).

AvantGo Goes RSS

Eugenia Loli 2005-10-18 Wireless No Comments

The most popular PDA web browser, AvantGo, today announced the beta release of new RSS features in its mobile Internet service. The new features give users greater ease-of-use for viewing mobile RSS subscriptions online or offline, and expands the content available through AvantGo. If your phone or PDA doesn't have an AvantGo client port, you can always use the web-based version through any other browser. OSNews and GnomeFiles have both AvantGo support (after creating a channel for them on your personal my.avantgo.com page) and they render well on small screens automatically.

Submitted by Valour 2005-10-18 SuSE, openSUSE 44 Comments

On October 6, Novell officially released SUSE Linux 10, the latest edition of its heavily armed desktop operating system. It offers a choice of great-looking desktop environments, a gigantic selection of desktop software and the much-acclaimed YaST setup and configuration program. Read the rest of the review here.

Best Performance Practices for SDO and the JDBC DMS

Eugenia Loli 2005-10-18 Java 1 Comment

This article shows you how to obtain the best performance from SDO and the JDBC DMS, by keep your metadata models as small as possible, ensuring that the most efficient SQL queries are being used, and by using static SDO models whenever possible.

Microsoft Shows Off New Vista Features

Eugenia Loli 2005-10-18 Windows 80 Comments

In its first update to a new community-based preview program, Microsoft is showing off a number of new features for Windows Vista, including efforts to improve the web browser and make the operating system more resilient.

Original BeOS Developer Now at Trolltech

Submitted by Lisa Sheeran 2005-10-18 Qt 19 Comments

Benoit Schillings, co-creator of the Be operating system (first engineer employee in 1992, creator of the BeOS app_server among other things) and former CTO of Openwave, has been appointed to the newly created position of chief technology officer (CTO) at Trolltech. In the meantime, Trolltech has also joined the new mobile OSDL initiative.

Microsoft Bakes Windows AntiSpyware Into Vista

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 Windows 62 Comments

Microsoft has confirmed plans to bundle anti-spyware protection into Windows Vista, a move that is sure to raise eyebrows among competitors and possibly antitrust regulators. "The core Windows AntiSpyware functionality gets built in," said Greg Sullivan, lead Windows product manager. "For unmanaged environments, home and small business users, we want to provide base-level security services."

Video Editing on a RiscPC

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 OS News 2 Comments

"Living in New Zealand, RISC OS user Peter Noble uses his RiscPC and Videodesk to edit film and produce presentations and videos for friends and family. Here, he talks us through how he typically puts together a short video."

Submitted by Rehdon 2005-10-18 Windows 67 Comments

"In response to a question on the role of open source software in Africa, Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that cost is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only US$160."

Tech Firms To Tackle Linux Desktop Standards

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 Linux 135 Comments

Adobe, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, RealNetworks and Red Hat are all backing the new Linux standards effort led by the Free Standards Group. The nonprofit organisation plans to marshal their resources to form standards for key components of Linux desktop software, including libraries, application runtime and install time. The group said Monday that it will encourage software developers to use its guidelines when building programs for Linux as part of its Linux Standard Base project.