OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

NetBSD pkgsrc will freeze for preparation of stable branch

Submitted by Jan Schaumann 2004-11-30 NetBSD 13 Comments

Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th 2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. Update: LiveCD/ISO instructions.

MikeB’s Guide for WinUAE: Updated

Mike Bouma 2004-11-30 Amiga & AROS 25 Comments

I have updated my guide for WinUAE at AmigaWorld. Check in for more info.

Setting Up an HP-UX CSE Serviceguard Cluster

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-30 Unix 3 Comments

Charles Keenan provides specific tasks for setting up a Serviceguard high availability cluster on HP-UX/Linux, including example commands to help illustrate key points.

Effective C#: Implement the Standard Dispose Pattern

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-30 .NET 46 Comments

Learn how to write your own resource-management code when you create types that contain resources other than memory, particularly for disposing of nonmemory resources.

C Data Types: An Understandable Guide for Beginners

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-30 General Development 11 Comments

This sample book chapter details the ways in which C programs deal with data, and how you mess with text and numeric data.

Regarding High Level Computing

Guest post by Kostis Kapelonis 2004-11-29 Editorial 66 Comments

The IT sector today is a complete mess. The end-users rarely understand this, but most insiders reach a point when they realize that things should be different. The problems are numerous but they all reduce to a basic principle. IT and consumer electronics companies are interested more about money than helping people solve their problems. Of course companies need to make a profit and nobody denies that. They should however make money by helping people and not by creating more problems for them.

Torvalds: GPL Needs Minor Work

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-29 Linux 84 Comments

The GNU General Public License, which is the most widely used free-software license and is used to license the open-source Linux kernel, is set for its first revision in 13 years. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, last week weighed in on the upcoming challenges facing GPL Version 3.

MySQL prepares for version 5.0; PostgreSQL 8.0-b5 Available

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-29 Databases 41 Comments

Open source database vendor MySQL AB will release version 5.0 of its eponymous database management system in the first quarter of 2005, a year after it first went in to alpha testing. Also, after 4 weeks of work, involving a lot of bug fixes, and documentation improvements to the source tree, PostgreSQL.org have released the 5th Beta of 8.0.0.

Gnome 2.8 – what’s new and cool

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-29 Gnome 67 Comments

Karl Fischer takes a walk through the latest version of Gnome, version 2.8 (screenshots), to illustrate a few of the best new features of this very popular desktop environment.

Sun, Microsoft to flesh out pact

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-29 In the News 17 Comments

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems on Wednesday plan to provide details about their six-month-old alliance for the first time.

Java Desktop for X

Submitted by Tay Hock Keong 2004-11-29 Desktop environments 20 Comments

Want to try a real Java + Linux based desktop? JD4X and ZerahStar are joining efforts to produce a next generation desktop. It is still in very early stages of development but worth the try.

XDE guide for Visual Studio .NET developers

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-29 General Development 6 Comments

Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to move into the mainstream. With IBM Rational XDE Developer v2003 — .NET Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to support you, there really aren't any excuses left to avoid exploring Web services. Start using them quickly and effectively through hands-on exercises. You'll be happy to see how easy it is to model and generate .NET XML Web services.

The solution to many logins and passwords

Guest post by Daniel van Eeden 2004-11-29 Privacy, Security 34 Comments

Remembering all the logins and passwords to all the services and systems you've got access to is pretty hard to do nowadays. Many people use the same login and password for multiple sites and systems. That won't improve security. One of the IT buzzwords is SSO (Single Sign-on). Most SSO systems are hard to setup and will only provide SSO to the systems of one company. It is possible to easily provide worldwide single sing-on.

Gnumeric 1.4.0 Released; AbiWord 2.2.0 Almost Here

Submitted by a friend on IM 2004-11-29 Office 34 Comments

Gnumeric is intended to be a drop in replacement for proprietary spreadsheets. It imports your existing Excel, 1-2-3, Applix, Sylk, XBase Quattro Pro, Dif, Plan Perfect, and Oleo files among others. The latest version 1.4.0 brings some major new features including: