OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Review: SUSE Linux OSS 10; SmartPM on SUSE

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.

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 Released Today

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 KDE 84 Comments

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 ~~will be released later today~~ has been released. The Klax live-CD has already been updated to ship with this new beta release. You can download this beta's source code yourself from the KDE download page. Updated by AS: Screenshots!

Haiku Boots from CD

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 Haiku 26 Comments

It has taken Axel Dorfler five days to get Haiku to boot from CD. "I successfully booted Haiku from CD-ROM from several machines today. It took a bit longer than I thought, as no emulator that I have access to seems to support multi-session CDs, and not every BIOS I have works by the book. Anyway, you could build you own bootable CD image with the "makehaikufloppy" script that's now in our top-level directory."

Microsoft Releases Code for Windows Server R2 RC1

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 Windows 13 Comments

Microsoft on Monday came closer to the final release of Windows Server 2003 R2, expected before the year's end, by making Release Candidate 1 available for download. The release of the RC1 code, which is available here, follows the release of RC0, in late August.

Sun Gives Unix Giants a Plus

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-18 Oracle and SUN 14 Comments

Sun on Monday began selling its highest-end Unix servers with new 1.5GHz UltraSPARC IV+ chips. Sun used its milestones and monster servers as fodder for bashing IBM, which recently began a Unix server upgrade. IBM has slotted the Power5+ chips into low-end systems but won't give higher-end servers the same boost until 2006. Even then, IBM isn't expected to have a system comparable in size to the E25K.

Intel Cuts PC Boot Time

Submitted by Dave 2005-10-18 Intel 18 Comments

Intel is showing off a future technology called Robson that could cut that annoying boot-up time. With Robson, a PC pulls data and applications off an add-in flash memory card and Intel software, rather than the PC's hard drive. Flash reacts more quickly than hard drives, thus cutting down the time it takes to launch an application. Potentially, notebook users could experience a longer battery life because the hard drive, which is spun by a motor, wouldn't have to work as hard.

Why Software Sucks (and What To Do About It)

Thom Holwerda 2005-10-17 Office 89 Comments

"No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so."