Keep OSNews alive by becoming a Patreon, by donating through Ko-Fi, or by buying merch!

CherryOS Sparks Talk of Virtualization Wars

In the News 64 Comments
Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit launched Virtual PC for Mac Version 7. Then, a Hawaiian company specializing in streaming video introduced CherryOS, a virtual PC that mimics the hardware of a G4 Mac. CherryOS inventor Arben Kryeziu, a software developer who got tired of carrying both a Mac and a PC all over Hawai, is confident the computing world will find value in his innovation. However, questions remain if his CherryOS is simply a modified PearPC. Update: An interesting conspiracy theory has been posted here.
Read More

Build Grid Portals with Grid Portal Toolkit 3

General Development No Comments
The Grid Portal Toolkit (GridPort) is a toolkit for developing Web-based portals and applications on top of an underlying distributed and grid computing infrastructure. GridPort aggregates grid services from grid software packages and provides additional grid capabilities while presenting a simple, consistent API for portal and application developers. This article presents an introduction to Grid Portal Toolkit 3, including the design philosophy, architecture, and capabilities of each component.
Read More

Announcing Ubuntu 4.10

  Submitted by Alan Moser Ubuntu 72 Comments
The warm-hearted Warthogs of the Warty Team are proud to present the very first release of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support. Update: A selection of screenshots from the final version.
Read More

An Ocean and Synth look at JDK 5.0

Java 8 Comments
Now that Tiger is an official release, it's time to explore even more exciting differences between the 1.4 version of the Java 2 Standard Edition platform and 5.0 of the Java 2 Development Kit. In this installment of Taming Tiger, UI expert John Zukowski explores the newly available Ocean and Synth look and feels. Now, even non-programmers can develop custom look and feels without writing code or having the benefit of a good eye!
Read More

Cross-platform packaging facility OpenPKG 2.2 released

  Submitted by Ralf S. Engelschall In the News 2 Comments
The OpenPKG project released version 2.2 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 2.2 consists of 528 selected (from a pool of 800) packages, all carefully packaged for easy deployment on 18 different Unix platforms. Focusing on portability and isolation, OpenPKG 2.2 places greater emphasis on reducing underlying Unix system requirements.
Read More

Increase stability and responsiveness by short-circuiting code

Java 3 Comments
Keep your Web applications running when tasks lock up. High volume Web sites often require asynchronous or threaded operations to achieve target performance criteria. While threads in Web containers are considered bad practice, the alternative is for developers to make blocking calls to code they cannot control. It becomes important that dependencies of this nature fail-fast. This developerWorks article covers a homegrown short-circuit pattern that ensures threaded execution and completion of a process in a fixed window of time.
Read More