OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

OpenSolaris Leadership Selected

David Adams 2005-04-05 Oracle and SUN 19 Comments

Casper Dik, Roy Fielding, Al Hopper, Simon Phipps, and Rich Teer were chosen to be the charter members of the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board. They will be responsible for the direction of the project and coordinating the efforts of volunteer contributors.

Praise for Windows 2003 SP1

David Adams 2005-04-05 Windows 39 Comments

The Register, which is generally no purveyor of Microsoft fawning, notes the many security improvements in Windows 2003 SP1, among those a perceived attitude change in its documentation that acknowledges security challenges inherent to their platform, and nifty features like the ability to tun off inbound network connections during setup to prevent the latest worms striking before you can run Windows Update.

Marketplace Fills Void on VB

Submitted by Tom Bartlett 2005-04-05 General Development 28 Comments

Visual Basic developers who are being left behind with Microsoft's discontinuing of "classic" VB have a short time to take advantage of an interesting offer. The makers of REALBasic will give registered VB6 users a free license to their software.

FireFox/Mobile Security News

Submitted by Scott 2005-04-05 Bugs & Viruses 17 Comments

The UK security research company, Secunia said that it has found a critical security flaw in Firefox web-browser that could put users at risk of information disclosure attacks. In other security news, a variant of the Cabir mobile virus, which was developed at first to prove it is possible, called Mabir, has been targeting mobile phones using Symbian Series 60 operating systems.

New Linux/Itanium2 Supercomputer

Submitted by Ken Farmer 2005-04-05 Benchmarks 15 Comments

HP and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have collaborated on a new 11.8-teraflop Supercomputer for the Department of Energy. The $24 Million HP Supercomputer uses the Linux OS and Intel's Itanium2 processors.

Linux on A Laptop: A Tinkerer’s Journal

Guest post by Will Gunadi 2005-04-05 Linux 61 Comments

Today, there is no shortage of reviews on Linux on the Desktop, but I think we can benefit from more "Laptopized-Linux" experiences. As laptops keep dropping in price and increasing in terms of computing power, they really make a nice platform even for cpu intensive applications such as sofware development, desktop publishing, web design, etc. And as you will see in this article, installing Linux on a laptop is not as hairy as you may think.

Microsoft offers EU concessions on server data

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-05 Microsoft 34 Comments

Microsoft has offered the European Commission about 20 concessions over the EU executive's order that it share data with rival makers of servers, the software firm said Monday.

Mark Shuttleworth Answers At Length

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-05 Ubuntu 47 Comments

Mark Shuttleworth is an astronaut, entrepreneur, activist, and now chief of Debian-and-GNOME based distribution Ubuntu Linux. Read his interview at Slashdot.

Preview of the operating system Windows Mobile 2005

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-05 Windows 11 Comments

The operating system is based on the kernel WindowsCE version 5.1. It differs from its predecessor in Direct3D Mobile (initially optimized for Wireless MMX), Windows Error Reporting, the possibility to work as a USB storage without drivers, improved support of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and so on.

Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-05 macOS 79 Comments

Point-counterpoint at DaringFireball's interesting editorials.

Latest Enterprise Linux review, JDS

Submitted by Ralph 2005-04-04 Oracle and SUN 18 Comments

In the latest edition of his series of articles on enterprise class Linux distributions, Tom Adelstein looks at Sun's JDS. As a reader of this series, I found each of the first three stories to represent distributions that were increasingly interesting. JDS has broken the trend. See the article at LinuxJournal here.

Adelstein: Linux Drives Innovation

Submitted by Sam Hiser 2005-04-04 Linux 23 Comments

For the first time that we know of, Federal Computer Week magazine is reporting on open source software. This weekly, which gets onto the desks of all Federal IT managers, has hardly acknowledged in the past that alternative solutions exist.

Google: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-04 In the News 10 Comments

In this program from Oct 2004, Jeff Dean of Google describes some of these challenges, discusses applications Google has developed, and highlights systems they've built, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. He also shares some interesting observations derived from Google's web data.

Linux fails in small business market

Guest post by Tom Sanders in California 2005-04-04 Linux 54 Comments

Linux is losing momentum among medium sized enterprises, according to a survey by Canadian research firm Info-Tech Research Group. After years of increased interest in the open source operating system, IT managers from medium sized businesses have come to a conclusion that open source is not for them. The findings point to a rift between large enterprises that are increasingly embracing open source and smaller businesses that opt for a Microsoft-centric world.

Linux 2.4.30 kernel is out

Submitted by anonymous 2005-04-04 Linux 20 Comments

Marcelo has announced the availability of the 2.4.30 kernel; no changes were made after 2.4.30-rc4. Since 2.4 is in deep maintenance mode, there is little in the way of new features in this release. It does contain a number of security updates and other important fixes, though.

Linspire and the Insider Program

Guest post by Michael Valentine 2005-04-04 Linspire 65 Comments

I signed up to become a Lindows Insider (now Linspire) back in February 2004, after giving Lindows 4.5 Developer Edition a try and walking away very impressed about how far Lindows had come. I was very hesitant plugging down $99.00 for something you could do free with most other Distros which I thought was beta testing and voicing your opinion, but figured I had nothing to lose since they offered a 100% Money Back Guarantee on the program.

Red Hat Linux 4.0 offers power, security

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-04 Red Hat 31 Comments

In a Clear Choice test of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, (tested RHEL 4.0 Advanced Server, Red Hat’s most robust Linux distribution), ComputerWorld found huge performance gains over previous editions, beefed up security options and vastly improved hardware detection mechanisms.

Businesses slow to move to SP2

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-04 Windows 38 Comments

Microsoft has urged businesses running Windows XP to upgrade their machines to take advantage of added security features, but only a quarter of XP corporate machines have been upgraded to Service Pack 2, according to a new study.

FreeBSD: ‘make’ for non-programmers

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-04 FreeBSD 18 Comments

"If you're a typical FreeBSD user, you don't have a background in C programming. Yet, if you've ever used make world to upgrade your operating system or issued a make install somewhere within your ports tree, you've compiled C code. This article covers some make basics so you have an idea what is happening behind the scenes. It also examines some of the options you have available when issuing make commands." Read it here.

64-bit Linux and BSD are maturing steadily

Eugenia Loli 2005-04-04 Hardware 19 Comments

"While the theoretical speed advantage and expanded resources of 64-bit computing are enticing to those in need of maximum performance, the road to a perfect AMD64 desktop, workstation or server machine is long and treacherous. What operating system will you use? Is there enough 64-bit software available? In this article we'll explore some of the advantages and pitfalls of going totally 64-bit in a 32-bit world." Read more at NewsForge.