NetBSD enabled PAM

Christos Zoulas announced recently that as of 2005-02-27, NetBSD has PAM enabled for all applications that perform authentication. Support for PAM, which is specified in the X/Open Single Sign-On standard, was originally imported into NetBSD-current on December 12th, 2004. This means that NetBSD 3.0 will ship PAM-enabled per default; users following -current should take care to update their systems using etcupdate and/or the '/etc/postinstall' script. See Christos' email to the current-users mailinglist and the OpenPAM website for more details.

Divide & Conquer: The Demise of Unix

"Has it managed to completely escape the attention of the "open source" movement that Adobe, Macromedia, Corel, and so forth have blithely continued to remain virtually Windows-only while waiting for the dust to settle? Only now they have realized that it won't settle and oh-so-quietly the rush of announcements of support for Linux has not translated into a rush of quality applications." Read the editorial here. I've written a similar editorial a few years back.

Opinion: What Went Wrong at HP?

With HP's high-flying CEO Carly Fiorina departing, the company's woes are well known. But how did a firm with such a storied history and vast assets get headed down the wrong path, and what do they need to do to set their course straight?

Cobalt Makes Meager Progress

An eWeek article reports that "more than a year after PalmSource Inc. released its Palm OS Cobalt operating system, only one handset manufacturer has announced plans to bring a Cobalt-based device to market." This is despite the fact that version six of the PalmOS has been in developers' hands for more than a year. But even PalmSource's corporate sibling, PalmOne, has no Cobalt-based devices in sight.

MenuetOS 0.78 Released

MenuetOS 0.78 is released. Changes: New Panel and Menu system, new options for Windows, automatic memory detection, .ICO support, and faster rendering, updated JPEGVIEW application; Displays jpeg image as backgound, new launcher application; Startup applications, PCNET32 Ethernet Driver, it now works with VMWare, TCP/IP bug fixes to TCP retransmissions, window resizing/moving.

Intel Demos New Chips

According to a CRN article, Intel has "has made good on its vow last year to rewrite its product road map to focus on dual-core and multicore processors." In addition to imagining chips aimed at mobile, lightweight, and other boutique applications, the processor giant also (with MIcrosoft's backing) reiterated its commitment to move desktop processors to 64 bit with all possible haste.

Bounties for Gnome’s Optimization

Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs. If you are a developer and you are interested in some extra cash or prizes by making Gnome more usable on machines with 128 MBs of RAM (very usual configuration in developing countries or even European businesses), please read here. Related post here.