OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Longhorn Roadmap Update: New Unseen-Before Screenshots

Submitted by Eric 2005-03-22 Windows 114 Comments

Paul Thurrott has updated his "Road to Longhorn" article with new, never seen before screenshots of Longhorn. Some interesting new approaches to usability and UI can be seen there.

Linux lags Windows in new security report

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-22 Privacy, Security 64 Comments

A report released today indicates Windows Server 2003 may actually be more secure than its most popular Linux competitor when it comes to vulnerabilities and the time it takes to patch them.

Firebird SQL Server 2.0 Alpha-01 Release

Submitted by Juarez Rudsatz 2005-03-22 Databases 24 Comments

This alpha release contains a large number of new features, including derived tables, support for Execute Block, increased table sizes, new improved index code (the 252-byte index length limit is no longer applicable), expression indices, numerous optimiser improvements, enhanced security features, support for on-line incremental backups along with many other improvements & bug fixes.

LUFS – An Answer to the Problems of Desktop Virtual Filesystems

Guest post by Matthew T. Atkinson 2005-03-22 General Development 38 Comments

Though great advances in Linux Desktop usability have been made in recent years, one rather large area of difficulty still exists, posing some serious issues on the ease-of-use front. There is, however, a little-known solution to these problems...

Java Plug-ins for browsers on OS/2

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-22 OS/2 9 Comments

This article provides an introduction to Java Plug-ins and describes the configuration details of Java Plug-ins from different flavors of Java Runtime Environment (JRE), such as Runtime Environment for IBM OS/2 Warp Developer Kit, Java 2 Technology Edition, Version 1.3.1 and InnoTek OS/2 Kit for Java 1.4.2, Runtime, for the Web browsers viz. IBM Web Browser (IWB) and Netscape Communicator; available on the OS/2 Operating System.

Visopsys 0.54 Released

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-22 OS News 11 Comments

Visopsys is an alternative operating system for PC compatible computers. This is a maintenance release, with numerous small improvements and bugfixes including some general back- porting from the 0.6 development branch. In addition, IDE disk-to-disk operations have been improved so that they can happen in parallel, the kernel hardware drivers have been given a new interrupt handing interface, and there is some improved efficiency in a performance-critical section of the multitasker.

Zeta OS is rising from BeOS ashes; Haiku News

Submitted by Kian Duffy 2005-03-22 Zeta 40 Comments

NewsForge offers a preview of yellowTAB's upcoming Zeta 1.0 while elsewhere, the Haiku app_server is now able to draw to screen, accelerated, under Haiku.

ThunderBird 1.0.2, Mozilla 1.7.6 Released

Submitted by Dave Southern 2005-03-22 Mozilla, Gecko 21 Comments

Mozilla 1.7.6 was released and Thunderbird-1.0.2 was too, with security updates.

New MonoDevelop release

Submitted by Diego Dompe 2005-03-22 Mono 14 Comments

After some months without releases, MonoDevelop 0.6 is now available . It uses GTK# 2.0.

Read-only XFS support for FreeBSD 6-CURRENT

Submitted by Edwin Brown 2005-03-22 FreeBSD 6 Comments

A patchset against -CURRENT enables readonly XFS support for FreeBSD.

Novell Says Its Next Linux Desktop Will Surpass Windows

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-22 Novell and Ximian 226 Comments

At its BrainShare conference, the company says its Novell Linux Desktop 10 will include a new desktop search technology, named Beagle, along with a technology for rendering the desktop using the GPU.

eComStation Roadmap 2005

Submitted by Eugene Gorbunoff 2005-03-22 OS/2 21 Comments

eComStation is an Internet enabled platform for business desktop computing. To keep users informed, Serenity Systems International published their roadmap.

Sun Changes Support Policies

Guest post by Bruno S. Delbono 2005-03-22 Oracle and SUN 22 Comments

As seen here and being discussed here, Sun has decided to restrict support for:

Novell Linux Desktop 9 Review

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-22 Novell and Ximian 9 Comments

Focusing on the best desktop candidates for deployment in enterprises, this article takes a look at Novell Linux Desktop 9.

Mobile Internet’s Uncertain Future

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-22 Internet 23 Comments

A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets, a pioneer of the World Wide Web said. More editorials on the subjects here and here. This is a good opportunity to remind everyone that both OSNews.com and GnomeFiles.org support ~120 mobile HTML-capable devices automatically (no reason to enter special URLs) in addition to our WAP-only sites. About 2,000 readers visit daily OSNews with such devices (out of ~250,000 readers, on average, daily).

iPod tipped to boost Apple’s desktop share

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-21 Apple 44 Comments

Apple could soon control 5 percent of the desktop computer market, Morgan Stanley predicts, thanks to the success of the iPod. Elsewhere, Apple released Mac OS X security update today.

Gates maps out future for Microsoft anti-virus; Aero UI

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-21 Windows 44 Comments

Microsoft boss Bill Gates pledged further action to help users and firms improve security when he opened the RSA conference in San Francisco late February. Also, Longhorn Aero UI won't debut until PDC 2005 while while Microsoft delays major developer tools and database releases.

Tiger to bring improved 3D gaming performance

Submitted by Anonymous 2005-03-21 macOS 62 Comments

As we already know, the performance of DOOM 3 for Mac in comparison to its Windows counterpart is a little depressing - but those tests were on a Mac running Panther. Now running Tiger, some have seen an incredible performance boost. A clean install of both the latest Tiger beta (8A414) and DOOM 3 saw a steady 35-40 FPS at 1024x768 on High quality, with 2x Anti-aliasing enabled. Quite an improvement over Panther.

New AmigaOS4 video

Submitted by Captain Moo Moo 2005-03-21 Amiga & AROS 23 Comments

From Amigaworld.net: "Thanks to Crisot, finally a new AmigaOS4 video showing Petunia JIT, WarpOS, Warp3D 5.0 and many many other fantastic features". The video shows AOS4's speed, stability, and responsiveness on a PPC G3 800HMz.

Intel ships 64-bit, 2MB L2 Pentium 4s

Eugenia Loli 2005-03-21 Intel 24 Comments

Intel yesterday formally began selling its Pentium 4 6xx series, rolling out four versions of the 90nm, 2MB L2 cache chip. The chip giant also added its latest P4 Extreme Edition to its official price list. The P4 630 (I got one of these), 640, 650 and 660 are clocked at 3, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6GHz, respectively. All four chips support an 800MHz frontside bus. They also bring Intel's AMD64-like 64-bit addressing technology, EM64T, to the mainstream desktop, along with the latest version of the company's SpeedStep power management system, to minimise energy consumption. The anti-virus 'execute disable' bit is also supported.