Recently, I got my hands on version 0.2 of Cobind, a Linux lite desktop, based on Red Hat/Fedora Core 1, from a software company in Pittsburgh. Not yet in general release, Cobind is a one disc wonder.
The Debian Project announced their AMD64 port is ready for inclusion in Sid. The port is currently at 97% compiled with most of the remaining packages having FTBFS RC bugs filed for unrelated reasons.
Microsoft says its set of upgrades for Windows Server 2003, due to be included in Service Pack 1, will make its products more secure by default and give enterprises more options for locking down servers.
"We now have two distinct classes of Linux users whose interests are not the same, and perhaps we have more than that if we want to talk about people who think of software in political rather than pragmatic terms. Can these factions work together, or will tensions between them eventually kill the free software and open source movements?"Read the editorial at NewsForge.
Given the rapid growth of Linux in the technology industry, it might be easy to overlook other open source Unix variants. But recent numbers from research outfit Netcraft show that past is prologue. FreeBSD, that other Unix variant, has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year.
In GNUstep 0.9.3 spell checker has been reimplemented using libaspell. There is a new NSComboBox implementation. NSToolbar is much improved. There are binary incompatibilites from ivar additions in NSView and subclasses, a number of W32 window event enhancements, and art backend glyph drawing with alpha enhancements. On other toolkit news, the C++ Fox Toolkit 1.2.4 was released.
SkyFS has been updated to support the "Securtiy Context", and has now become a full multi-user filesystem. All files can be associated with such security contexts to permit various file operations (read, write, append, list, modify etc.) for all users specified in this security context only. In other news, system-wide controls have been polished up (screenshot available on website), and preliminary translation and support for the Chinese language has been implemented.
The recently announced GNOME 2.6 has finally brought many features long awaited by the Linux desktop fans. GNOME 2.6 is all about ease of use, performance and unification and while it's unfortunately hard to say that the GNOME desktop feels fast, it certainly began to be really easy to use and it has consistent look and feel — and that consistency is what makes up for most of the quality of a graphical user environment. UPDATE: Scroll down the article to read some added commentary.
common language runtime objects, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Structured Query Language (SQL). Content controls like Button and listable ItemsControls like ListBox have built-in functionality to enable flexible styling of single data items or collections of data items. Sorting, filtering, and grouping can be applied to the data. Read the articles here.
GTK+ 2.4.3 is a bug fix release and is source and binary compatible with 2.4.0. The main reason for this quick followup release is a problem with the button size allocation logic in 2.4.2, which showed up in the Gimp. A number of other bugfixes have been included as well.
Pocket C# is port of C# compiler from DotGNU project to Windows CE. DotGNU contains open-source runtime, compiler and tools creating a free cross-platform .NET environment.
Working largely on their own time, Linux devotees apply their collaborative model for creating software, known as open source, to attack SCO and its case. Dozens of online detectives comb corporate documents, analyze legal filings and publish everything they can find about the company, its finances, management and connections to Microsoft.
In a move that could ultimatety deal a heavy blow to Microsoft's intellectual property rights, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will re-examine patent the company holds on the FAT (file allocation table) file system, a format used for the interchange of media between computers and digital devices.
Linux.com has published a review of Red Hat Desktop, Red Hat's new RHEL3-based corporate desktop product. It's a lot like Red Hat 9 was, except not available as a standalone product anymore. The software that comprises it is a little old, as well, but at least everything seems to work, says J. Matzan.
