OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

S2 ‘mystery man’ Anderer Speaks on MS, SCO, and Licensing

Submitted by so_lazy 2004-03-14 Legal 22 Comments

"I do not think any company except a few of the largest companies can offer any reasonable insulation to their customers from these types of judgments. You would need a market cap of more than a couple billion to just survive in the OS space." A very interesting read from S2's CEO about the legal side of OSes today. And it seems he is not far off the truth at all.

Some Reasons Why I Prefer Gnome over KDE

Submitted by Ronny Klein 2004-03-14 Gnome 149 Comments

Rony Klein explains a few of the reasons why he prefers Gnome over KDE, an article accompanied by screenshots illustrating his case.

BeOS Memory Limitation Work-around Achieved

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-14 Haiku 36 Comments

The well-known limitation of BeOS to crash when too much memory is installed is now hacked around by some people in the community. The first patch, patches the kernel to "think" that only 64 MB is installed in the machine. We would advise the team to make multiple hack packages for 64, 128, 256, 384, 512, 640 and 768 MBs of RAM (the right amount is different for each user because it depends on the MBs the graphics card reports to the PCI level, not just how much RAM and gfx RAM is actually installed). This hack is for BeOS 5.x systems.

QNX 6 NTFS Driver v0.50 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-14 QNX 2 Comments

A. Domo has released a new version of his NTFS driver for QNX. The new version runs as a daemon.

New MirOS snapshot featuring XFree86 4.4, Ada, Pascal

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-14 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

MirOS announced the release of a new snapshot of MirOS BSD #7-current. Read more.

AbiWord and GIMP Ports for SkyOS Finalizing

Submitted by Robert Szeleney 2004-03-14 SkyOS 26 Comments

AbiWord 2.0.2 and GIMP 2.0-pre3 are available for SkyOS. SkyOS 5.0-beta4 will include AbiWord and GIMP as GTK ports as well as a few other GTK applications like a Calender, Notepad etc. In other news, a new binary PE handler (faster program loading/linking) has been implemented as well as SkyGI performance improvements.

InnoTek GCC for OS/2 Beta 4 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-14 OS/2 4 Comments

InnoTek GCC for OS/2 is a commercial distribution of the GNU C/C++ compiler suite and associated utilities for the IBM OS/2 platform. InnoTek maintains an OS/2 platform port of the GNU C/C++ compiler suite and provides comprehensive support for the compiler environment to enterprise customers. Read more at eComStation's web site.

Why Good Ideas Fail, Part II

Submitted by Usman Latif 2004-03-14 Editorial 34 Comments

The software industry is very fearful of open source software, but this fear is irrational. The software industry can quite easily combat OSS as similar challenges have been met successfully in other industries. Part II of "Why Good Ideas Fail" discusses the future evolution of the software industry, and the implications of this evolution for innovative ideas.

MySQL Addresses Open-Source License Problem

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-14 Databases 37 Comments

MySQL has taken a step to mend a rift in the open-source world by updating a controversial licensing provision that had broken a close tie between the MySQL database and another software package.

Firefox Browser: Easy, Fun, Fast, Safe, Free

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 Mozilla, Gecko 75 Comments

Houston Chronicle reviews the Firefox browser and for the most part it gets a glorious review.

Technoids Issue 5 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 Haiku 17 Comments

The PDF online magazine Technoids issued v5 with a number of articles including an interview with BeOS MAX 3.1 people, 20 years of Macintosh and a review of the latest Zeta (all in German).

Interview with Matthew Dillon of DragonFly BSD

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 Original OSNews Interviews 26 Comments

Today we feature a very interesting interview with well known *BSD hacker Matthew Dillon over his latest project, DragonFly BSD (also known for his Linux kernel contributions, Amiga C compiler hacking back in the day and the Backplane distributed database). Matthew discusses DragonFly's status, goals, the overall BSD platform, innovation, and more. Update: Added one more question at the end of the Q&A.

GNU Screen: an Introduction and Beginner’s Tutorial

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 Unix 39 Comments

Most modern Unix-based operating systems (e.g. Linux, MacOS X, and BSD) come with a little console-mode utility called GNU Screen. It's a powerful tool in the hands of the console warrior, a veritable Swiss Army knife of text-mode human-computer interaction.

Subversion 1.0.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 General Development 5 Comments

This release of Subversion fixes about 25 small bugs discovered during the six-week code freeze for 1.0.

DotGNU Portable.NET 0.6.4 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 .NET 9 Comments

DotGNU's Portable.Net is a portable suite of tools (including a C# compiler, assembler, and runtime engine). In this release, the C to IL bytecode compiler is now in good shape, and many bugs were fixed in System.Windows.Forms and System.Xml.

ekkoBSD 1.0 BETA 2 for Sparc-64 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 BSD & Darwin 8 Comments

ekkoBSD.org has announced the latest beta release of the ekkoBSD Operating System to the public today.This release supports the Sparc 64bit Platform.

Sun should Open Source Unprofitable Parts of Java

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-13 Java 14 Comments

Even if Sun prefers to retain control over a stragic asset like Java, it should take a hard look at the components of Java that are related to platform-breadth and market-reach rather than to profitability, and slough these off to small, reactive Open Source efforts. javax.swing.text.html would be a good component to start the experiment with, says Rick Jelliffe. Check out the comments on that page too.

GNOME 2.6 Desktop & Developer Platform Beta-2 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-12 Gnome 32 Comments

Download the second beta of Gnome 2.6, while you can read the announcement and changelog here.

An Analysis of Sun’s Linux and Opteron Strategy

Submitted by Bascule 2004-03-12 Oracle and SUN 17 Comments

If HP and IBM can't make money selling the same or lesser boxes for more, what reason is there to believe that Sun can? Scott McNealy used to describe x86 retailing as adding bruises to bananas, but now he's doing it. Read the article at LinuxInsider.

A Plea for Relief from Microsoft’s Escalating Anti-Competitive Tactics

Submitted by Dave 2004-03-12 Microsoft 90 Comments

David Mohring has written an open letter to antitrust, competition, consumer and trade practice monitoring agency officials worldwide, asking for relief from Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics.