OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Lawsuit Alleges Apple Retail Impropriety

Submitted by Too 2004-03-19 Apple 65 Comments

Deep inside a dealer lawsuit against Apple is a burning question: how do Apple's retail stores account for what they pay for the Apple products they sell? The dealers behind the lawsuit believe they have the answer: that Apple is defrauding shareholders and misleading the public by misrepresenting the profitability of its stores. Substantiating their claim are thousands of product invoices says ThinkSecret.

Mozilla 1.7 Beta Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-19 Mozilla, Gecko 48 Comments

Mozilla 1.7 beta is released with better Chatzilla, Js, Palm Sync, Kerberos support. Changelog.

Mandrake Linux 10 is a Ten

Submitted by Gsurface 2004-03-19 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 51 Comments

Yet another review raving about Mandrake Linux 10.0 Community Edition can be found here.

Mono 0.31 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-19 Mono 43 Comments

The Mono project released version 0.31. Changelog here, download from here.

Novell Management Tool, YAST, Gets Free

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-19 SuSE, openSUSE 54 Comments

Reversing a long-standing position, Novell plans to adopt a widely used open-source license for its Linux management tool in a plan to spread the program and make its SuSE Linux product more popular.

Syllable: New ATA & ATi drivers, New IDE

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-19 Syllable, AtheOS 20 Comments

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).

Windows Mobile Update to Launch Next Week

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-19 Windows 2 Comments

Microsoft is expected next week to announce an update to its Windows Mobile OS, which powers cell phones and handhelds. Native VGA and Landscape support is rumoured.

OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64

Guest post by Tony Bourke 2004-03-18 NetBSD 28 Comments

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.

Can a Red Hat Guru Survive on a Lindows Laptop?

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 Linspire 28 Comments

"I found Lindows 4.5 Laptop Edition to be a mixed bag for experienced users. It installs easily, barring download issues and getting into the BIOS to change the boot sequence. But beyond the basic install, it took a lot of work to get everything else installed and configured the way I wanted it." Read the article at LinuxJournal.

GNOME 2.6 Desktop & Developer Platform RC1 Available

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2004-03-18 Gnome 20 Comments

GNOME 2.6 Desktop & Developer Platform Release Candidate 1 (2.5.92) is now available.

Are You Talking to Me? Speech on Mac OS X

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 macOS 27 Comments

Apple's recent announcement of Spoken Interface has moved speech recognition to the forefront. However, Mac OS X has included speech recognition and synthesis technologies for quite some time, and in this article MacDevCenter delves into the often misunderstood world of talking to your Mac.

EU, Microsoft Fail to Agree on Deal

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 Microsoft 59 Comments

Microsoft's last-ditch talks aimed at reaching a settlement with the European Union and avoiding antitrust action have failed, paving the way for a landmark legal ruling next week.

Order on Plantiff’s Motion in Thendic Amiga Case

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 Legal 6 Comments

The motion by Genesi in their case against Amiga Inc was granted in part, but denied in other ways. Specifically, Genesi is granted rights to AmigaDE (source code access is not specifically mentioned), but denies them access to AmigaOS. Read more to get to the actual file and description.

Microsoft Salutes Open Source – Cautiously

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 Microsoft 23 Comments

Microsoft recognises the benefits of open source but is not prepared to turn over its Windows operating system to the paradigm. Instead, Microsoft provides access to source code on a limited basis, said a Microsoft representative.

A closer look to Mandrake-Linux-10.0 Community

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 73 Comments

Here is a positive Mandrake-Linux-10.0 Community Edition review with screenshots.

Novell Announces First Commercial Linux Featuring 2.6 Kernel

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 SuSE, openSUSE 48 Comments

Novell today unveiled SUSE LINUX 9.1 Personal and SUSE LINUX 9.1 Professional, the first complete commercial Linux products based on the 2.6 kernel, providing the only significant retail Linux products on the market, says the PR. eWEEK has an article about it too and MadPenguin an interview.

Microsoft Apologizes For Previous Anticompetitive Acts

Submitted by Tudy Parghel 2004-03-18 Legal 62 Comments

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."

Microsoft Releases Windows XP SP2 RC-1

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 Windows 23 Comments

The release candidate of Windows XP SP2 offers several new features not offered in the first beta that shipped in December, including the Windows Security Center accessible from the Windows Control Panel, the Pop-up Blocker on by default and for consumers, the Windows Update V5 RC1.

Binary Delta Compression Overview

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-18 General Development 27 Comments

This document describes Binary Delta Compression (BDC) technology and its use in software update deployment. This implementation of BDC technology developed by Microsoft reduces the download size of software update packages by downloading only the differences between old files and new files.

Patent Issues in the Software Industry

Submitted by special 2004-03-18 Legal 32 Comments

In response to Havoc Pennington's post on the future of open source desktop development, GNOME's in particular, two prominent GNOME and Mono Hackers, Miguel de Icaza and Paolo provide their interesting perspective on the subject here and here.