OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Gumstix and eInk – A glimpse of future plans?

Guest post by Jaapjan Tinbergen 2004-09-15 Hardware 10 Comments

Gumstix is something I've ran into during my ever-continuous search for high tech gadgets in the embedded world. I like staying up to date with Via Mini- and NanoITX boards, iPaq's running Linux and things like Sony Librie and their restrictive DRM. It is an ever changing world out there, especially with the recent rise of iTunes and the MS-music store. These too try new techniques for a good balance between security and piracy. But I wasn't going to go into this. Too deeply. To get back on the road I'll tell you a little secret.

Review: VMware 4.5.2

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 OS News 8 Comments

Virtual machine software allows you to run one operating system (and its applications) from within the environment of another. For years the most recognized name in virtual machine software for the x86 architecture has been VMware, whose eponymous industry-leading product supports a wide variety of guest operating systems. Read the review at NewsForge.

Sharing files over a network with NFS

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 OS News 3 Comments

As users chose to supplement their RISC OS computers with a second machine, there grows a need to manage files over a network. With this in mind, Paul Stewart guides us through evaluating and configuring NFS with RISC OS and Windows.

Apple acquires Curvus Pro X

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 macOS 51 Comments

In need of a modern graphing calculator application for its Mac OS X distributions, Apple stopped coding and went shopping overseas.

Sun to Help Microsoft Sue OpenOffice.org Users?

Submitted by spank_da_monkey 2004-09-15 Oracle and SUN 40 Comments

Microsoft and Sun have a very suspect legal settlement going on possibly relating to openoffice.org customers. More info here, here, and here. Update: Looks like this isn't quite the controversy everyone thought. Newforge has an update.

Gnome 2.8 Released

Adam Scheinberg 2004-09-15 Gnome 93 Comments

Gnome Desktop Environment 2.8 was released today, on schedule. Including a slew of new features and the much anticipated Evolution 2.0, Gnome 2.8 achieves several milestones. Release notes can be found here, and a number of screenshots here. In other Gnome news, a new Gnome news site, gnomejournal.org, was announced today.

ZFS–the last word in file systems

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 Solaris 43 Comments

The ZFS, breakthrough file system in Solaris 10, delivers virtually unlimited capacity, provable data integrity, and near-zero administration.

A Review of Firefox for Newbies

Guest post by Hooman Baradaran 2004-09-15 Mozilla, Gecko 60 Comments

A while ago there was an article Mozilla's web site mentioning that they are switching their browser component to a new one (at the time called Phoenix). It was a simple and fast browser so I started using it instead of Mozilla. Mozilla Firefox uses the same engine as Mozilla. The difference is in the user interface as well as some features.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 Announced

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 Graphics 28 Comments

With pro features like 16-bit per channel support, camera RAW and the healing brush, Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 3.0 today. Digital photo users in particular now have the choice of this powerful application that has little competition in its range, be it the free Gimp or the similarly priced PaintShopPro. Picture Window Pro is the only photo application that can outfeature Elements (and depending on the case, even Photoshop itself sometimes). Picture Window Pro is one of the favorite applications of photography professionals and it's at the same price range as Elements, 90 USD.

GNOME: We’ve overtaken Windows, bring on Apple

Submitted by Jeff Waugh 2004-09-15 Gnome 121 Comments

An upgraded GNOME desktop environment for Linux and Unix is due for release this Wednesday, with its authors pitching enhanced features for end-users and a commitment to make hardware "just work".

FireFlyBSD unveiled

Submitted by Eduardo Tongson 2004-09-15 BSD & Darwin 12 Comments

Formerly known as SilverOS (previously featured on OSnews), FireFly is a commercially supported BSD system based on DragonFlyBSD. You can read the FireFly whitepaper here.

Virtual PC 7.0 released under pressure, lacks planned features

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 Microsoft 12 Comments

Amidst pressure from several avenues, Microsoft was forced to cut features from its new Windows emulation software in order to deliver G5 compatibility without further delays.

Writing Open Directory Plug-ins

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-15 macOS 2 Comments

With Open Directory your application can locate and manage information about users and other resources in your existing network infrastructure. Read this article to learn how to write Open Directory plug-ins that take advantage of this capability.

UserLinux Installs with a 4.5 MBs Download; SlideShow Available

Submitted by Chris Haney 2004-09-15 Linux 26 Comments

"The UserLinux Project has placed a downloadable installation mini-CD in beta test. The CD is only 4.5 megabytes in size, and downloads the rest of the system during the installation." LinuxBeta.com's screenshot slideshow shows UserLinux in action.

Apple Expo France 2004 Show Report

Guest post by Nicholas Blachford 2004-09-14 Apple 20 Comments

Apple is holding their European Expo and nowadays being a Mac owner thought I'd go along. If Apple has such a pitiful market share then you'd expect it to be a small show with little software and few visitors. Er No, this was the complete opposite. Pictures of the Expo included.

Major JPEG graphics flaw threatens Windows PCs

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-14 Privacy, Security 31 Comments

Microsoft published a patch for a major security flaw in its software's handling of the JPEG graphics format and urged customers to use a new tool to locate the many applications that are vulnerable. Users who have installed SP2 are not vulnerable to the flaw.

Solaris 10 to be Open Source

Submitted by science_monkey 2004-09-14 Solaris 63 Comments

Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday. Also, Jonathan Schwartz showed 32-Way UltraSPARC chip that runs Solaris 10.

ReactOS 0.2.4 released

Submitted by tgc 2004-09-14 ReactOS 5 Comments

ReactOS 0.2.4 has been released, and is downloadable from sourceforge.

SkyOS Tour Available

Submitted by Robert Szeleney 2004-09-14 SkyOS 23 Comments

A new "tour" is available at the SkyOS homepage, showing off what will be available in SkyOS 5.0. Included are many screenshots. This is a good summary of everything that has been done with SkyOS over the past year. In other news Developer Studio, GCC 3.4.0, Binutils 2.15, Make, Python, Autoconf, and many other development tools are new available for SkyOS, as well as Blender3D. The SkyOS community has been busy as well, developing such applications as Personal Organizer (e-mail client/organizer), SkIRC, AFTP, and a few others.

New Tiger builds include Address Book sharing, PDF bookmarking

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-14 macOS 8 Comments

New builds of Apple's Mac OS X Tiger operating system are beginning to surface with dozens of previously unpublicized features.