Since usability seems to be a major topic on the OSNews forums, I think time has come to clarify some common misconceptions. Usability is not about selecting the fanciest Theme from kde-look.org, it's not about 'Reading the F*** Manual', it's not about having all application share the same looks, it's not about nice front-ends to obscure command line programs, it's not about newbie-friendliness, it's not about apt-get install foobar and it's not about setup.exe.
The corporate desktop GNU/Linux distribution is a relatively new invention, having begun with SUSE/Novell Desktop, then followed by Sun's Java Desktop System and Red Hat Desktop. But with much less fanfare, Mandrakesoft released a Corporate Desktop product last January.
KernelTrap has spoken with OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt and several other OpenBSD developers regarding their recent efforts to add comprehensive wireless hardware support to OpenBSD. The article takes an in depth look at several of the dozen new drivers found in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.7 release, exploring the stories behind their development.
Who said that the iPod can only be used as a music player? Pod2Go is here to transform your iPod from a mere music player and file storage gadget to a (sort of) PDA.
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.
In this document I will walk you through the process of creating a Debian package for Xandros 3.0. When completed this package will install the Kasablanca FTP client. Read
more.
The Council Presidency today declared the software agreement of 18 May 2004 to have been adopted, in violation of the procedural rules and in spite of the evident lack of a qualified majority of member states and the requests of several states to reopen negotiations. More here.
The porting process on a large scale introduces many new problems - and also opportunities for automation and removal of tedium. In this article Peter Naulls discusses the ideas behind a RISC OS "autobuilder".
As criminals operating online have begun to realise the potential commercial value of Internet-related crimes, so they have started to investigate other ways of using malware to line their pockets.
People have said many times that Blackbox development, the minimalist window manager for X, was dead. With sometimes as much as two and a half years passing between stable releases, I can see why they'd get such ideas.
"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.
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?
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.
