OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

The Kiwi behind Firefox

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-18 Mozilla, Gecko 34 Comments

Ben Goodger is the lead engineer for the open-source browser Firefox, which has been gaining in popularity in a market overwhelmingly dominated by Microsoft. He talks about Firefox's history, and how he sees it competing with Longhorn in this interview.

MirBSD #8-beta-20041016 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-17 BSD & Darwin 13 Comments

MirOS BSD originated as a patch set against OpenBSD-current, a 4.4BSD-derived ultra secure operating system. This release includes bugfixes and enhancements for many system components, including libc, ld.so, ntpd, make, and others. There is support for PowerNow on AMD Athlon / Athlon XP systems. libexpat is in the base system now. gcc support for C++ and other languages is still missing.

Real life test of ext3 vs reiserfs

Submitted by reader 2004-10-17 General Development 36 Comments

A KDE dev has attempted to put ext3 and reiserfs to a real world test. The results are interesting, and confirms what many of us already knew. Check out the experiment for details.

A font primer for X11

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-17 Wayland 63 Comments

This article aims to clear up that confusion about the different font types and how Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems) incorporates them into the user experience.

New NetBSD Port, NetBSD/Iyonix

Submitted by Anon Coward 2004-10-17 NetBSD 10 Comments

Gavan Fantom of NetBSD, has imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree, the new NetBSD/iyonix port. The IYONIX pc is an ARM-based desktop machine. It offers virtually silent operation, low heat, and all the other odds and ends offered by a modern PC. NetBSD is one port closer to a NetBSD/toaster port.

Solaris Performance Benchmarks

Submitted by Victor Hooi 2004-10-16 Solaris 109 Comments

There's a benchmark comparing Solaris to Red Hat at Sun's web site. Solaris 10 features a new TCP/IP stack architecture, project FireEngine. Sunay Tripathi posted some performance data on his blog as well that people might be interested in. He will also be posting details about the new architecture and how it allows Solaris 10 to perform exceptionally well on 1-2 CPU and also scale linearly across large number of CPUs. With the low end x86 platform moving soon to 8 CPU (and AMD's dual core, 8 CPU), scaling is something that can't be ignored anymore.

RISC OS 4 and 5 to merge

Submitted by Andrew Duffell 2004-10-16 RISC OS 25 Comments

RISC OS 4 which is produced by RISCOS Ltd, and RISC OS 5 produced by Castle Technology are to merge in a deal announced last night. The Icon Bar has the full story.

Critique of Where Perl 6 is Heading

Guest post by Shlomi Fish 2004-10-16 General Development 71 Comments

The purpose of this essay is to explain why I believe Perl 6, the way it currently seems to progress, is the wrong thing at the wrong time, and why I predict (with all the expected caveats of predicting something) that it won't be successful. I will also suggest a better alternative for the future of Perl which makes more sense at this point.

Edit and Continue in Whidbey

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-16 General Development 24 Comments

Microsoft is going to add "edit and continue" for C# on the next Visual Studio.

MP3 losing steam?

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-16 Multimedia, AV 89 Comments

After years as the unrivaled king of the digital-media world, the venerable MP3 music format is losing ground to rival technologies from Microsoft and Apple Computer.

Mac Takes Honors as Best Unix Desktop; OSX Tiger Release Date

Submitted by Richard Levangie 2004-10-15 macOS 120 Comments

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says GNOME is nice, KDE is fine and the forthcoming Looking Glass may be wonderful, but the best Unix desktop is the one in the Macintosh. Elsewhere Apple seeds Mac OS X Server 10.3.6 build 7R20 while Amazon leaks Mac OS X Tiger release date?

Updates for Windows XP Media Center and XP Tablet PC

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-15 Windows 3 Comments

Here's Update 1 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 Recognizer Pack.

Haiku: Input Server Up and Running

Submitted by Jonathan W 2004-10-15 Haiku 28 Comments

In the last weeks, Jérôme Duval has worked on completing the input_server. He is happy to announce that the input_server is in a working state now, and can even be compiled and used as a drop-in replacement for the R5 input_server. Read more. Elsewhere, YellowTAB released a Zeta magazine.

Get enhanced security with IBM’s release of 1.4.2 Java SDK

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-15 Java 11 Comments

The 1.4.2 release of the IBM developer kit for the Java platform provides the most comprehensive security offering for the Java 2 platform to date. It differs from the Sun 1.4.2 JDK in that IBM has implemented providers for all the Java security components. It includes several IBM-specific security providers with new features and better security enhancements than the Sun 1.4.2 JDK. This articles discusses the new IBM JDK release and a solid foundation for developing and deploying security-sensitive, end-to-end enterprise applications. The new 1.4.2 JDK can downloaded from here.

yellowTAB releases Zeta Neo

Submitted by jeanmarc 2004-10-15 Zeta 52 Comments

While development towards Zeta OS 1.0 advances at a steady pace, yellowTAB has decided to do an interim release called Zeta Neo, so that users can enjoy the many enhancements incorporated into the Zeta OS so far. Zeta Neo has a long list of improvements over previous versions of Zeta, including two new applications, updated and new drivers, support for IDE hard disc drives larger than 120GB, redesigned Preference panels, improved and expanded localisation support, updated development tools, and an expanded Zeta Manual.

Microsoft (Belgium) Cancels Mono Presentation in Belgium

Submitted by Marcus 2004-10-14 Mono 64 Comments

This week Friday Gert Driesen and Philip Van Hoof were to do a presentation about Mono at Microsoft Belgium. Soon later, Microsoft's Belgium legal team cancelled the presentation. The reason was that for doing such a presentation, Microsoft Belgium needed approval of their legal team in the USA first.

Intel kills plans for 4GHz Pentium

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-14 Intel 84 Comments

Intel is dumping plans to release a Pentium 4 processor that runs at 4GHz, saying will boost performance on next year's chips using other means that clock speed.

Interview on open source and Linux with Novell, Perens

Eugenia Loli 2004-10-14 Novell and Ximian 7 Comments

Open source advocate Bruce Perens and Novell Principal Engineer Adam Loughran appeared on Hawaii's Think Tech Radio last month, discussing the economic benefits of using open source software (OSS). In the hour-long interview, which is available for download, host Don Mangiarelli provides a forum that allows a wide audience to better understand Linux, open source, and free software.

JDS gets Gaming Support from GCCLinux.com

Submitted by Sam Hiser 2004-10-14 Oracle and SUN 25 Comments

Tom Adelstein interviews Ricardo Wagemaker on DesktopLinux.com. Wagemaker, based in the UK, is founder of GCCLinux.com, a company (Global Computer Corporation) and Web site dedicated to supporting GNU/Linux--and the Java Desktop System ("JDS") in particular--as the premier entertainment and gaming environment.

Google Desktop Search Tool Goes Beta

Adam Scheinberg 2004-10-14 In the News 39 Comments

Google has released a beta version of their desktop search tool which runs on Windows XP and 2000 SP3+. Details can be found here and more in depth reviews here and here. Its release is amid more concerns of privacy, many of which began when Google's Gmail system was introduced. Update: AOL wishes the same.