OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Ubuntu 4.10 Warty Warthog Put to Test

Guest post by Garret 2005-02-26 Ubuntu 46 Comments

Ubuntu is supposed to be a very user friendly distro. I guess the real test, as far as I was concerned, was to see how my wife (a computer neophyte) and my 6 year old son would do. My wife just sat down, opened FireFox and went to Ebay without noticing she wasn't in Windows. Read the full review at GUILinux.com.

Linux to Mac : A switcher’s story

Submitted by Anonymous Reader 2005-02-26 Apple 97 Comments

"Mad Echidna" has posted an article about his migration from a Linux based PC to an old iMac in this article. My Take: My reply to his annoyances:

yellowTAB to Showcase Zeta 1.0 at Cebit 2005

Submitted by jeanmarc 2005-02-26 Zeta 35 Comments

yellowTAB is pleased to announce that it will unveil version 1.0 of its flagship product, the Zeta Operating System, at Cebit 2005. Zeta 1.0 will incorporate many fixes over previous versions, as well as some new exciting features.

Free 30-day Subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Submitted by Maceto 2005-02-26 Red Hat 32 Comments

With the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat wants to give you the opportunity to try the latest release of Red Hat's market-leading Linux technology. For a limited time, you can download a free 30-day subscription to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 product of your choice (AS, ES, WS, or Desktop).

StanaPhone: Skype’s big competitor?

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-26 Internet 38 Comments

StanaPhone is the first free telephone with real US phone numbers, and a Skype competitor.

Apple CFO muses on iPod halo effect, Mac mini, more

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-26 Apple 33 Comments

Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer was a featured presenter on Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa in Phoeniz, Ariz. During the half-hour session, Oppenheimer answered questions about the iPod's "Halo" effect, the importance of the Mac mini, Apple's continued retail efforts and other issues facing the company.

Sources: IBM ditching Itanium altogether

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-26 IBM 46 Comments

IBM is not only discontinuing support for Intel's Itanium processor in a new generation of server technology, it's going a step further, dropping Itanium servers from the product line altogether, sources familiar with the situation said.

Short Slackware 10.1 Review

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-25 Slackware, Slax 14 Comments

Tuxmachines.org has a mini-Slackware 10.1 review, and some screenshots.

Protothreads: extremely lightweight, stackless threads in C

Submitted by Adam Dunkels 2005-02-25 General Development 12 Comments

In many embedded systems, memory is severely constrained. RAM sizes on the order of a few hundreds of bytes or less is very common. Full multithreading may not be an option because of the memory required for thread stacks. For such systems, the newly released Protothreads Library provides a very lightweight alternative: protothreads are a stackless type of threads with only two bytes of RAM overhead per protothread. The library is implemented in pure C without any machine specific code. Protothreads are currently used in the Contiki OS and will be used in the upcoming version of the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack.

Kerrighed 1.0.0 has been released

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-25 Linux 7 Comments

Kerrighed is a Single System Image operating system for clusters. Kerrighed offers the view of a unique SMP machine on top of a cluster of standard PCs. The goals of Kerrighed are high performance of applications, high availability of the cluster, efficient resources management, high customizability of the operating system and ease of use. Kerrighed is implemented as an extension to Linux 2.4.24 (a set of Linux modules and a small patch to the kernel). Port to kernel 2.6.x is planned for later this year.

First Look At Solaris 10

Submitted by Sanjaya Sugiarto 2005-02-25 Solaris 113 Comments

Sun has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Read the review here.

Ready or not, Windows XP update is coming

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-25 Windows 54 Comments

Microsoft is alerting customers that it will soon start delivering Windows XP Service Pack 2 to all customers using Automatic Update, whether they want it or not.

Desktop Face-Off: Xandros vs. Mepis

Submitted by LinuxTimes 2005-02-25 Linux 17 Comments

In this article, LinuxTimes compares Xandros 3 Open Circulation Edition and SimplyMEPIS 2004.6.

Paper “The Implementation of Lua 5.0” available

Submitted by Marco Pontello 2005-02-25 General Development 12 Comments

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo has notified on the Lua mailing list that a paper in PDF format on the implementation of Lua 5.0 is now available for downloading: The Implementation of Lua 5.0 - Roberto Ierusalimschy, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes. Reccommended to anyone interested in the internals of Lua.

Opera 8 Beta2 Available

Submitted by Ben Strozykowski 2005-02-25 Opera 30 Comments

Opera 8 Beta2 is now available with a host of new features, including security fixes, and UI enhancements. Would be nice to see an Opera version for PocketPCs too, not just for Smartphones.

Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 Review

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-25 Wireless 17 Comments

Sharp has always been an innovator with the Zaurus line of PDAs and the newest member of that family is no exception. The Zaurus SL-C3000 takes the utility of previous generations and extends it even further. The C3000 is a clamshell device that resembles a miniature laptop when opened and has a bright vivid screen that is wonderful to work with.

NetBSD 2.0 Rendezvous

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-25 NetBSD 41 Comments

In December 2004, the NetBSD Project released the feature-rich NetBSD 2.0. Even after such a masterpiece, developers kept working on improvements, new features, and new ports following the new development roadmap. Federico Biancuzzi recently interviewed them to find out what they are working on and how they plan to promote their project in the near future.

Microsoft to disable product activation over Net

Submitted by Joel Pomales 2005-02-25 Windows 90 Comments

Customers who find themselves reinstalling Windows XP should be ready for a headache: Microsoft will no longer support activating the product over the Internet.

Firefox 1.0.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2005-02-25 Mozilla, Gecko 51 Comments

Firefox 1.0.1 is a security update for the 27 million users who have already downloaded the free browser. The Mozilla Foundation encourages all users to download the update.

ZoneBSD Announced

Guest post by Bascule 2005-02-25 FreeBSD 14 Comments

I've started a project in anticipation of the upcoming release of OpenSolaris called ZoneBSD. The goal of the project will be to factor as much code from OpenSolaris as necessary into FreeBSD in order to support running FreeBSD from within a Solaris Zone, allowing virtualized FreeBSD instances to be run atop a host instance of Solaris.