OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

RISC OS united at long last

Submitted by Ian Chamberlain 2004-07-16 RISC OS 36 Comments

In a historic announcement, issued jointly this evening by RISCOS Ltd., Castle, Advantage 6, MicroDigital and VirtualAcorn, it would very much appear that the past on-going disputes surrounding RISC OS have been settled. Take a deep breath, then wait for this.

FreeBSD Install Guide

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 FreeBSD 37 Comments

This is a step-by-step guide to installing FreeBSD 5. It assumes moderate experience with linux and leaves you with a fully updated FreeBSD system.

VMWare Workstation 4.5.2 Review

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 OS News 33 Comments

VMWare makes it very easy to run Linux right on your Windows desktop (and the other way around). And, if you're feeling adventurous, you can even try running the beta versions of the next version of Windows called "Longhorn" or even Sun's Solaris operating system. Read the review at ExtremeTech.

The Downlow on Mono

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 Mono 54 Comments

After three years and much controversy, Miguel de Icaza's Mono project has finally released its 1.0 version. NewsForge recently talked with Erik Dasque, the senior project leader for Mono, about the release of 1.0, the controversy and criticisms encountered along the way, and the plans for the future.

Understanding WinFX in Longhorn

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 Windows 16 Comments

"In this continuing series of Longhorn articles, I will talk about the APIs that developers will use to write the next generation of Windows applications. In this article I will focus on WinFX and discuss briefly the rest of the technologies. I will give you a high-level introduction to WinFX and what it means to developers." Read the article by Wei-Meng Lee at WindowsDevCenter.

Better, Faster, Lighter Programming in .NET and Java

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 Java 5 Comments

Two articles at OnJava, first an article titled "Better, Faster, Lighter Programming in .NET and Java" and also "Avoiding J2EE cluster bugs".

Sun staff give birth to 64-bit Solaris on Opteron

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 Solaris 49 Comments

"It's alive!" was the cry issued this week by the Solaris grunts at Sun Microsystems. For the first time, the engineers managed to get a true 64-bit kernel up and running on an Opteron box. This is a key milestone in Sun's ambitious plan to make Solaris a preferred operating system in the x86 world.

Building The Next Generation, Part 2: The OS

Guest post by Nicholas Blachford 2004-07-15 Editorial 80 Comments

This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. In the first part I described a system with a multi-core multi-threaded CPU, FPGA and Cell processors. In this second part we start looking at the Operating System.

An Introduction to Mono as a Unified Development Platform

Submitted by Kevin Francis 2004-07-15 Mono 27 Comments

ArsTechnica brings you an introduction to Mono. For starters, they will dish up a basic introduction to Mono, MonoDevelop, and C#, and then branch out to GTK#, database access, ASP.NET, advanced C# topics, and conclude with a discussion of the future of Mono, and the C# standard. Not a Linux guy? Don't worry, all examples will work on Windows and Linux, with OSX support coming shortly.

Sun May Put Java Server on Open-Source Table

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-15 Java 14 Comments

The company on Thursday issued a statement saying, "Sun is considering open sourcing Java Enterprise System, but no final decision has been made." A Sun representative attributed the statement to Stephen Borcich, executive director of Sun's Java Enterprise System, and offered no other details.

Mono: More than an open-source curiosity

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-15 Mono 29 Comments

To de Icaza, replicating Microsoft's hard work--much of which has been published to standards body Ecma International--will make other operating systems, notably Linux, more attractive to developers. And with the "universal virtual machine" of .Net, programmers can have a greater choice in languages. In his office decorated with small stuffed monkeys ("mono" means monkey in Spanish), de Icaza spoke to CNET News.com shortly before the company began shipping Mono version 1.0.

Solaris Express 7/04 Released

Submitted by fintanr 2004-07-15 Solaris 7 Comments

The latest release of Solaris Express is available for download. Tonnes of new features again, as listed on blogs.sun.com by the three A's, Alan, Alan and Adam.

DragonflyBSD 1.0A Released

Submitted by Lani 2004-07-15 BSD & Darwin 10 Comments

Due to an installer/fdisk bug there is an update available. Current Dragonfly version is 1.0A.

Is .Net Stealing Java’s Thunder?

Submitted by Jayson Knight 2004-07-15 .NET 25 Comments

.Net is fast becoming the developer's platform of choice --in spite of Microsoft's poor promotional job.

Slackware 10: First Impressions

Guest post by Michael Hall 2004-07-15 Slackware, Slax 105 Comments

My first experience with Slackware Linux came with version 9.1, after 4 years of using various versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux. I disliked the general direction these distributions were moving in and didn't see their increasing focus on the "big end of town" as auguring well for either myself or clients of my small one-person IT consultancy business. I quickly became a Slackware convert and have since used it exclusively for all my server deployments. Check in for more and 15 screenshots from Slackware 10.

Subversion 1.1.0 coming up

Submitted by tom 2004-07-15 General Development 12 Comments

The first release candidate of Subversion 1.1.0 is ready and available. From the release notes: Subversion 1.1 can best be summarized as: (1) a new non-database repository back-end, and (2) a whole slew of client-side improvements.

Operator Overloading in Visual Basic 2005

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-15 General Development 16 Comments

Operator Overloading, new to Visual Basic 2005, simplifies the use & development of complex types by allowing you to specify your own implementation for standard operations such as addition & subtraction.

Linux: Low Latency and Filesystems

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-15 Linux 16 Comments

Continuing the earlier discussion about low latency and Ingo Molnar's voluntary kernel preemption patch, the conversation moved onto the affect a filesystem can have on latency. Specifically, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton noted that ReiserFS was known to have some latency issues in both 2.4 & 2.6 kernels.

J2EE vs .Net Web Services Performance

Submitted by Jayson Knight 2004-07-15 Benchmarks 28 Comments

Sun claims for Java performance Vs .NET and the MS counter-claim.

Document Indexing Systems Comparison

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 General Development 3 Comments

Here's an interesting article by Seth Nickell, comparing Metadata Index Systems and Document Stores.