OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

MorphOS 1.4.5 Released for Classic Amiga

Submitted by Emil 2005-08-24 Morphos 18 Comments

The MorphOS team has released MorphOS 1.4.5 PowerUp for Commodore A1200, A3000 and A4000 computers equipped with PowerPC accelerator cards by phase5 & DCE. The MorphOS team does not provide any support, but community support is here.

Visopsys 0.57 Released

Submitted by Andy McLaughlin 2005-08-24 OS News 12 Comments

Version 0.57 of Visopsys is now available for download. This is a bugfix and maintenance release. There are various GUI touch-ups, the Disk Manager (a.k.a. Partition Logic) now updates disk geometry information in FAT partitions after disk copy operations, the window 'list' component has been reimplemented, and a number of kernel improvements have been back-ported from the 0.6 development branch. As always, the ISO image is an installable live demo. Downloads here, changelog here, and Freshmeat announcement here.

Google Makes IM/VoIP Play, Releases Google Talk

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Google 115 Comments

Google has launched an instant-messaging (IM) program that allows text chat and computer-to-computer voice connections, a move that highlights the search giant's increasing competition with Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online. You can download Google Talk here. Google also makes it very clear that you do not need Google Talk to use their service, and they provide detailed instructions on using other IM clients to connect to Google Talk. Update: Micheal Robertson announces partnership with Google to promote the use of open standards in VoIP/IM.

Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 55 Comments

Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 3 was quietly released on Tuesday. No mention of the release is as of yet posted at MandrivaLinux, but a 3 ISO set and a Mini CD are available for download. You can read the changelog, and there's also a review available (screenshots included).

Windows Vista SDK Goes Live

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Windows 9 Comments

"Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit for Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1. This edition provides documentation, samples, header files, libraries, and tools designed to help you develop applications and libraries that target Windows Vista Beta 1."

Word Processors Compared: OOo Writer, AbiWord, and KWord

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Office 44 Comments

OpenOffice.org receives most of the attention among FOSS office suites, but users shouldn't forget that free software includes at least two other word processors: AbiWord, and KWord, part of the KOffice suite. From their inception, both have been playing catch-up with OpenOffice.org's Writer. But now, after several years of development, AbiWord and KWord are both reaching early maturity. How do Writer, AbiWord, and KWord compare?

Intel Tools on the Way for Mac Coders

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Intel 9 Comments

Intel said that it plans later this year to offer test versions of software tools aimed at allowing Mac developers to improve the performance of programs that run on its chips. The software maker said that later this year it will offer beta versions of both its compiler and its performance libraries, which contain code optimised for both digital media and scientific computing tasks.

NetBSD Announces Timelines for Two Upcoming Releases

Submitted by Geert Hendrickx 2005-08-24 NetBSD 15 Comments

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for October 2005; NetBSD 2.1 for the middle of September 2005. These dates are of course subject to change.

Optimize for SSE

Submitted by hakime SEDDIK 2005-08-24 macOS 8 Comments

Vector programming doesn't stop with PowerPC. Learn how to do SIMD vector programming for MacOS X for Intel. This page provides an overview of the hardware and programming interfaces involved, and provides detailed translation help information for leveraging your investment in AltiVec forward to the SSE world.

Eclipse CDT 3.0 Released

Submitted by ajam 2005-08-24 General Development 24 Comments

One of the longest running Eclipse projects, a fully-functioning IDE for Eclipse 3.1, has a new release out. The CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) Project just recently released 3.0, with a bunch of new improvements.

Submitted by jeanmarc 2005-08-24 OS News 30 Comments

Start-up XenSource has succeeded in booting Microsoft Windows on top of Xen software, an important milestone in its effort to commercialize the virtual machine.

Submitted by wakeupneo 2005-08-24 Linux 11 Comments

Japan's Miracle Linux Corp., China's Red Flag Software Co. and Haansoft Inc. of South Korea are teaming up to release Asianux 2.0, a Linux distribution meant to compete with Microsoft Windows in their home regions.

AMD to Intel: Let’s Rumble

Submitted by Jophn Deo 2005-08-24 Hardware 33 Comments

The challenger has called for a "shoot-out" over whose dual-core chip performs better. Question is, can it shake Intel's corporate dominance?

Submitted by kellym 2005-08-24 Apple 14 Comments

It's been two months since Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computer was going with Intel processors, and in that time, Apple's transition toolkit has made its way into the hands of the Macintosh cognoscenti. And in that time, it's become clear that this transition will likely be the easiest of all those yet experienced by Apple developers.

Discussion: Which is Your Favorite Browser Extension?

Adam Scheinberg 2005-08-23 Internet 150 Comments

The last few years have seen the introduction of the concept of "extensions" in most popular web browsers. While Mozilla natively supports extensions, Opera and Safari come feature-packed and can be easily hacked via config files, and a market has cropped up around the IE engine which supports adding new functionality to your browser. In the interest of sharing a good thing, which are your favorite browser extensions?

Interview: With Tuomo Valkonen

Submitted by Jens Persson 2005-08-23 Graphics 19 Comments

This week in Arch Linux's news letter there was an interview with Ion's creator Tuomo Valkonen. Ion is a complete desktop environment built on the tiling windowmanager PWM. It uses Lua as an embedded interpreter which handles all of the configuration. It mainly uses the keyboard to access the functions but also supports the mouse for some things.

Linux-on-Mac Seller Aims to Fill Void

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-23 Linux 35 Comments

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based servers from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's XR9 systems use the same G5 chip as Xserve, but at 2.4GHz, the chips are slightly faster than those used in Apple's servers.

Submitted by kellym 2005-08-23 Intel 39 Comments

During his keynote address at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Otellini unveiled the company's next-generation, power-optimized micro-architecture for future digital home, enterprise, mobile, and emerging market platforms aimed at a new category of converged consumer devices.

Getting Started with launchd

Submitted by Hakime SEDDIK 2005-08-23 macOS 25 Comments

In Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization and prepared the system for the user. These venerable programs are widely used by system adminstrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

One-Stop Security

Submitted by Danny 2005-08-23 Privacy, Security 3 Comments

Confusion, fear, procrastination; these are words often associated with making decisions about IT security and as threats become more sophisticated it is easy to see why. The increasing popularity for workforce mobility have made detecting and eliminating threats purely from within the corporate network alone an inadequate approach to network security.