OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Why Sun Threw in the Towel in Mankind vs. Microsoft

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-04 Oracle and SUN 32 Comments

Principles are fine things to have, but only if you can afford them. With its stock declared a 'junk bond' and finishing a terrible quarter, Silicon Valley's leading Microsoft antagonist Sun Microsystems has now decided it can't, says Andrew Orlowski for TheRegister.

Gentoo Linux: Your Friendly Quick Installation Guide

Guest post by Doug M. Swain 2004-04-03 Gentoo 59 Comments

Doug Swain takes a look at the Gentoo Linux installation and offers a quicker guide than the available online documentation of the distro.

First Look at SuSE Linux Professional 9.1

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-03 SuSE, openSUSE 18 Comments

Another SuSE release and another review on Mad Penguin. What's so special about this release to merit taking up your valuable time?

Red Hat Linux Loyalists Leery

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-03 Red Hat 43 Comments

Two years ago, when Rick Carey was chief technology architect at Merrill Lynch, he was crazy about Linux and especially about Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor. At the time, he was leading the charge to migrate all of the computer systems at Merrill to Linux. But these days, things have changed. Elsewhere, Internetnews has a brief interview with Red Hat's CEO.

Fink 0.7.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-03 macOS 8 Comments

Fink 0.6.3 (for OS X 10.2.x) and Fink 0.7.0 (for OSX 10.3.x) were released today. These releases includes source and binary packages as well as binary installers.

New Front Page Design for OSNews to Focus on Original Content

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-03 OS News 313 Comments

After about two years we decided to do a makeover of the front page of OSNews. This new design focuses more on the original content we host rather than the previous "newsbits"/portal nature of OSNews. Let's just say that we try to have a... mini focus shift.

Programming with Qt, Part 2

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-03 Qt 1 Comment

In the previous installment of this series, Philipp K. Janert, Ph.D. implemented two very simple example programs, which nevertheless demonstrated quite a few of the core concepts of Qt programming. This month, he will take a step back and look at some of the fundamentals of programming with Qt.

Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 Technology Preview Available

Submitted by Gsurface 2004-04-03 Windows 2 Comments

This Technology Preview is based on the Beta 2 build of Windows CE 5.0 and is subject to change prior to the final release of the product. This preview is intended for evaluation purposes only.

Just About Right: Revisiting Mandrake 9.2 and Fedora Core 1

Submitted by Timothy R. Butler 2004-04-03 Linux 5 Comments

The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much that those running distributions now going on a year in age are really missing anything terribly substantial. OfB.biz did find a few interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1. Read the whole look back at the last distribution release cycle at OfB.biz.

The State and Future of GNOME

Submitted by Brad Griffith 2004-04-02 Gnome 94 Comments

In response to the article about Free Software and usability, Brad Griffith decided to write up an article about the niceties of GNOME and its future. Mirror here.

Xandros: Good Defaults but with Expandability Problems

Guest post by Ross Edwards 2004-04-02 Oracle and SUN 68 Comments

What happens when a user moves full time to Xandros? How the technical and third party software support works out of the Canadian Linux distro?

Sun Settles with Microsoft, Announces Layoffs

Submitted by Jayson Knight 2004-04-02 Oracle and SUN 46 Comments

Sun Microsystems announced Friday that it has moved to a new phase of legal and technical cooperation with longtime foe Microsoft that will involve a payment of $1.95 billion to Sun, reports News.com. The timing of the Microsoft-Sun agreement could be seen as a smokescreen to mitigate the continued bad financial and layoff news for Sun, says NewsForge.

A Quick Look at the SUSE 9.1 Beta

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-02 SuSE, openSUSE 21 Comments

Joe Barr takes a quick look at the beta of the upcoming of SuSE 9.1 at Linux.com.

Linux for Grandma, Part 2

Submitted by Zsoltik@ 2004-04-02 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 23 Comments

Matthew Newton takes a look at new releases of Mandrake and the Gnome 2.6 desktop, with an eye toward bringing one more Linux user online.

Custom Debian Distributions

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-02 Debian 11 Comments

This paper written by Andreas Tille is intended to people who are interested in the philosophy of Custom Debian Distributions and the technique which is used to manage those projects. It is explained in detail why these are no forks from Debian but reside completely inside the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and which advantages can be gathered by this approach. The concept of meta-packages and user role based menus is explained. In short: This document describes why Custom Debian Distributions are important to the vitality and quality of Debian.

F-Script: An Interactive & Scripting Layer for the OSX Object System

Submitted by Philippe Mougin 2004-04-02 General Development 7 Comments

The F-Script project released a new version of F-Script, which is an open source, interactive and scripting environment built from scratch for Cocoa, the native Mac OS X object model. F-Script allows interactive exploration, testing and use of Cocoa-based objects and frameworks. It can be used stand-alone or embedded into other applications. This new version comes with many new features, including greatly improved graphical tools for manipulating Cocoa objects.

What it Really Takes to Get Good Usability on a Product

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-02 Graphics 106 Comments

John Gruber replies to Eric Raymond's usability rants on Free Software, and we extend John's view to a more broad analysis.

MSDN TV: Longhorn & WinFS; WinForms and Non-Rectangular Apps

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-02 Windows 15 Comments

In this episode of the .NET Show Quentin Clark and Anil Nori share some of the architectural concepts of WinFS, and how it changes the way programmers and users will interact with the information they store on their systems. Later Mike Deem walks through some code that shows how to code against this new file system in order to make information easier to work with. Elsewhere, Mike Harsh shows how to use the RegionMaster Controls sample from WindowsForms.net to create non-rectangular applications, like Windows Media Player, using Windows Forms.

Basic Slackware Security

Submitted by oldskoolphreak 2004-04-02 Slackware, Slax 20 Comments

This article is meant to be a crash course in Slackware security. It will detail some basic steps that should be taken before you consider Slackware to be fully installed.

Microsoft: Longhorn Beta Unlikely this Year

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-02 Windows 32 Comments

Microsoft's efforts to bolster security in Windows XP will likely delay the release of a widespread test version of its forthcoming OS, Longhorn, until next year, Microsoft's executives told CNET News.com.