Syllable: New ATA & ATi drivers, New IDE

Michael Krueger has written an ATi Radeon driver, based on the Linux 2.6 framebuffer driver. It should support all chips up to 9800/Pro/XT and features native mode setting, 2D acceleration, hardware cursor and YUV422 video overlay support. Arno Klenke has released a beta version of his new ATA disk driver. With support for 48bit LBA drives, chipset support for Intel, Via, SiS, AMD and nVidia chipsets, better performance throughout and a multi-threaded design Syllable gains a significant speed boost. In the meantime, Rick Caudill codes Sourcery, a source code editor for Syllable (screenshot).

OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64

NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on my Sun Ultra 5. This will be the first in a series of operating system reviews for the SPARC platform. You can find the specifics of my evaluation machine here.

Microsoft Apologizes For Previous Anticompetitive Acts

Microsoft apologized to jurors for its past anticompetitive practices during opening statements Wednesday in a case alleging the company's antitrust violations include word processing and spreadsheet software. "Yes, we acknowledge that and we apologize for it," said David Tulchin, a Microsoft attorney. "The conduct involved competition that went over the line. The question for you is whether or not consumers were overcharged."

A Look at Win4Lin 5.1

As a student I am quite often confronted with (closed-source) Windows programs. These days there are a few tools that can help running Windows applications on Linux. One of these tools is Win4Lin, Win4Lin allowsone to install Windows 95, 98 and ME under Linux. The Windows NT branch is not supported yet, because Win4Lin sets up a special DOS environmentin which Windows runs.