Introduction to Open Source Scripting on Mac OS X
One of the advantages of OS X's BSD heritage (via Darwin) is that it has access to all the scripting languages found in UNIX(-like) OSes. Here's an introduction to open source scripting.
Unhappiness Drives Open Source Adoption
A common reason why more governments and enterprises around the world are moving to open source software is unhappiness, it was revealed during a panel discussion at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco yesterday.
Managed OS Code
Submitted by Review: YellowTAB Zeta 1.0
"Fans of BeOS still mourn its untimely demise all these years after the release of R5 and subsequent sale of its assets to Palm. Now ZETA, a successor to BeOS, has been released. Naturally, we had to review it."
GNOME 2.12 Beta 2 Development Release
KDE 3.5 Alpha Released to FTP
KDE 3.5 Alpha source tarballs are up on the FTP servers. This release is "really alpha quality", so no big announcement is planned. To get this release, you can either use Konstruct, or download the Klax KDE 3.5 Alpha Live-CD. Update: Here's a screenshot gallery of this release.
PalmSource Acts on Linux Ambitions
The company behind the Palm operating system, PalmSource, has just signed a technology partnership agreement with Montavista Software. Montavista, which specialises in GNU/Linux systems for wireless devices, is best known for its Mobilinux products for mobile phones.
Microsoft’s HoneyMonkeys Prove Patching Windows Works
Microsoft unveiled details of its Strider HoneyMonkey research, a project that sniffs out sites hosting malicious code, and hands the information to other parts of the company for patching or legal action. The technical report (pdf) outlines the concept of cruising the Web with multiple automated Windows XP clients - some unpatched, some partially patched, some patched completely - to hunt for Web sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities.
Opera Mini for All Java Cellphones Released
Submitted by
Opera released a mini/lite version of their 8.0.1 browser for all Java-enabled phones. On a similar note, the current leader of mobile phone browsers with 52% of market share, Openwave Systems, shipped one billion handsets with their browser in it.
New C/C++ Source Code Search Website
Submitted by
"After over a year of work, my C/C++ Source Code Search website is finally live! It allows you to search over 107 million lines of open source C/C++ code and it actually understands the C/C++ syntax thus giving better results. I'm currently adding 2 to 3 million lines of new code per day."
Scyld Software and Cluster Resources Form Alliance
Scyld Software today announced an agreement with Cluster Resources, an innovator in advanced workload and resource management software. The two companies have joined forces to extend the virtualization and system management capabilities of Scyld Beowulf Linux clustering software to include a powerful workload management toolset.
GPL3 First Public Draft Due Early 2006
The first draft of the next version of the General Public License should be released for public comments in early 2006, according to a key player in the effort to modernize the foundation of the free and open-source programming movements.
Windows Vista Beta 1: Administrator’s Preview
"Windows Vista is actually quite interesting for an administrator. When I first saw it on MSDN, I thought, "Over 2 Gig's. What could they have done for it to be that large without the drastic new UI?" Well, I have been looking at this thing for about a week now and I uncover more and more each time that I look into it. I am going to cover some of the enhancements that Vista will provide for administrators as well as a few neat little tidbits that I have not seen much of."
VOICE Newsletter August Released
The August edition of the VOICE newsletter is out. VOICE is a newsletter for the OS/2 community. The August edition includes articles on of course IBM quitting support for OS/2, OS/2 in the living room, image acquisition and much more.
Linux on the Desktop– Almost There Again?
Despite their best attempts, Linux software companies say they are still having a hard time luring average consumers away from the Windows environment--but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Novell's vice president: "(Linux on the desktop) is not the sexy story that it used to be. However, there are some very steady and irreversible trends."
Red Hat Network Gains Solaris, Monitoring Support
Red Hat's announcement that it is adding network and system monitoring to Red Hat Network isn't that much of a surprise. More unexpected is Red Hat's decision to support Solaris with it. In other news, the Fedora Foundation has been delayed.
Multifunction Multimedia Machine, Part II
The Mac mini offers a viable platform for embedded multimedia development. In this article, Lewin Edwards shows how to make efficient, direct use of the framebuffer to display JPEG files and discusses the issues involved in deciding between direct framebuffer access and using the X server as a graphics driver. Part I of this series can be found here.
Managing Linux Daemons with init Scripts
When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a "ready to go" distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.
Anti-MS Group Aims to Block Vista
Andy Martin of The Committee to Fight Microsoft on Tuesday announced his intentions to block Microsoft from releasing its Windows Vista operating system. Martin intends to ask Microsoft for an unconditional warranty that the operating system is free of bugs that could result in security vulnerabilities. He argues that no company in America gets away with selling a "defective" product the way Microsoft does.
Project Evil: Windows Network Drivers on FreeBSD
Project Evil provides a set of basic functions commonly used by Windows network drivers. These functions are then translated internally to the FreeBSD driver model. To the driver, it appears that it is running in a normal Windows environment. To the OS, it appears that a native FreeBSD kernel module containing the driver is present. This article explains how it works.