OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

One Year With SuSE

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 SuSE, openSUSE 54 Comments

"A year later I'm still with my good friend SuSE, being more productive than ever, while I still notice my neighbors are now living with the fact that their PCs are slower to use as a result of installing the new Microsoft software." More here.

Eric Raymond talks about GPL and BSD licenses

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Legal 134 Comments

Recently, during FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre), in Brazil, Eric Raymond defended open source model of development and quoted: "Basically, we don't need GPL. It's based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. With it, we continue injuring ourselves, cutting ourselves from the economic benefits of BSD license".

Spyware Floods In Through BitTorrent

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Bugs & Viruses 24 Comments

Anti-spyware advocates cry foul as the popular peer-to-peer protocol becomes the latest mechanism for the stealthy distribution of adware/spyware bundles.

Microsoft Shares More Clues About Longhorn Server

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Windows 6 Comments

Longhorn Server Beta 1 looks likely to hit by August. And Microsoft is considering a future home version of its Windows Server product, too.

Pipes and filters

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Unix 15 Comments

A pipe is a means by which the output from one process becomes the input to a second. In technical terms, the standard output (stout) of one command is sent to the standard input (stdin) of a second command. If you are not sure of the advantages this creates, then let's look at a simple example. Read more here.

The Best Linux Distribution?

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Debian 58 Comments

According to the Linux watching web site, DistroWatch, there are more than 400 Linux and BSD distributions currently available and active. Many of these exist with many versions, giving thousands of possible options to choose from. The question often arises "Which one is the best?".

Interview with an 8Ball..

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Apple 14 Comments

From the time at which Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be using Intel processors rather than PowerPC ones, every analyst, armchair CEO, and every anonymous forum poster with a two bit opinion suddenly became an 'expert' on the proper way to execute Apple's plan. "jwdsail" submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which offers an equally if not more accurate way to predict Apple's future plans... by consulting his Magic 8-Ball.

GNOME and KDE on Hurd

Submitted by Seo Sanghyeon 2005-06-16 Wayland 35 Comments

Michael Banck reports about porting of GNOME and KDE to GNU Hurd: GNOME screenshot and KDE screenshot

Hardening Linux: a 10 step approach to a secure server

Submitted by Flavio Villanustre 2005-06-16 Privacy, Security 12 Comments

The Internet has become a far more dangerous place than it was 20 years ago. Nowadays, Operating System and application security is an integral part of a server configuration and, while firewalls are very important, they are not the panacea.

The need for GPL Free Apps on Mac OS X

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 macOS 76 Comments

The Mac platform was always considered a premium platform, hence much of its software is shareware or commercial. In the recent days more freeware applications have emerged, but the majority are small utilities and not full scale applications. Enter the world of GNU which can not only provide "free" applications as in beer, but most importantly, "Free", as in Freedom.

Secret Life of the OpenSolaris code

Submitted by george 2005-06-16 Solaris 6 Comments

Looks like ZDNet Australia has gone trawling for dirty words in the OpenSolaris code. While they didn't find much there were some pearlers.

GTK+ 2.6.8 Released

David Adams 2005-06-16 GTK+ 32 Comments

GTK+ 2.6.8 is released with many bugfixes, mainly in the filechooser.

What’s New in Eclipse 3.1

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-16 Java 17 Comments

In late June of this year, the latest release of the Eclipse Platform, version 3.1, will be available for download from eclipse.org. Read more here.

Xen growing up

Submitted by Andrew Z. 2005-06-16 OS News 25 Comments

In August, XenSource will release Xen 3.0, software for running multiple operating systems on a single server. The Register's Ashlee Vance writes about big companies helping to make Xen a strong competitor with VMWare. New Xen features coming August and soon include better SMP support; x86 64-bit, Itanic, Power, and Intel VT CPU support; and Solaris and Windows support.

Java flaws open door to hackers

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-15 Java 13 Comments

Sun Microsystems has fixed a pair of security bugs in Java that could be exploited by attackers to take over computers running Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Sun has second thoughts about Linux on Solaris

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-15 Solaris 31 Comments

Sun Microsystems is guiding the spotlight away from a once-prominent feature of Solaris 10. Elsewhere, Solaris Engineering: huge amount of technical articles. Sun Microsystems is revamping the start-up process for its Solaris operating system, scrapping an awkward, elderly approach for one the company promises will be faster, more familiar and more useful on a wide variety of computers.

‘Mactel’ Desktops May Offer Triple-Threat OS

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-15 Apple 66 Comments

Apple won't stand in the way of people who want to run Windows on its forthcoming Intel-processor Macs. But whether or not users will be able to run Windows directly on the machines is still a mystery. Analysts fear short-term hit to Apple in wake of Intel deal: See sales of PowerPCs suffering if buyers wait until 2006 for Macs with new chips

New Recommendations for Using Strings in Microsoft .NET 2.0

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-15 .NET 4 Comments

Code owners previously using the InvariantCulture for string comparison, casing, and sorting should strongly consider using a new set of String overloads in Microsoft .NET 2.0. Specifically, data that is designed to be culture-agnostic and linguistically irrelevant should begin specifying overloads using either the StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase members of the new StringComparison enumeration. These enforce a byte-by-byte comparison similar to strcmp that not only avoids bugs from linguistic interpretation of essentially symbolic strings, but provides better performance.

PC makers snub Windows sans media player

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-15 Windows 34 Comments

Four major PC makers have no plans to sell the media-player-free version of Windows, which Microsoft was ordered to offer by Europe's competition commissioner.

BSD cognoscenti on Linux

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-15 BSD & Darwin 38 Comments

Recently NewsForge published an interview with Linus Torvalds on the similarities and differences between the Linux kernel and the BSD operating systems. As a follow-up, NewsForge asked similar questions of OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt, and NetBSD's Christos Zoulas.