The Myth of the Embedded Linux Tools Market

"Considering all of the possible support avenues, Linux support ends up being lower quality and more costly than the alternatives of using a homegrown operating system or purchasing a proprietary one. This will dissuade manufacturers who care about support from using embedded Linux. Those who remain with Linux will do so because support is not important to them, meaning that they will not turn to a commercial tools supplier for support either." Read the article at EETimes. Having EETimes say all that, MontaVista seems to do well.

A daemon-writer’s Guide to NetBSD’s rc.d system; Logo Contest

The NetBSD startup process is extensible, flexible, and a little daunting at first. This article looks at the configuration mechanisms used to enable or disable features, and compares NetBSD's startup procedures to those of other systems. The NetBSD Project has also announced that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. The cash prize is US $100 for the winning entry. Our Take: I hope the winning entry resizes well (see: it is clear enough) at 32x32pix, so we can update our NetBSD logo here at OSNews too.

The KDE 3.2 Beta 2 User Review

Around 3 weeks ago, I downloaded the 2nd beta of KDE 3.2 from their FTP site. I've been using this release every day since then. The purpose of my writing this piece is not to highlight KDE 3.2's new features and applications - read the Changelog at KDE's site for that - but to give you a complete picture of how it measures up to its previous versions in terms of everyday use. Does it make me more productive? Is the command line more efficient yet? Or, even better, does it make me use the command line more effectively? Read on...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 45-day Free Trial Edition

Virtual PC is a powerful software virtualization solution that allows you to run multiple PC-based operating systems simultaneously on one workstation, providing a safety net to maintain compatibility with legacy applications while you migrate to a new operating system. It also saves reconfiguration time, so your support, development, and training staff can work more efficiently. This is a 45-day time-out, full version of the Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 product. No serial number is required.

IM With File System Support: Putting the BFS Attributes in Good Use

The IM Kit is a modular framework developed to make it easy to access various IM networks (ICQ, AIM, etc) and is designed in a way it is fully integrated with BeOS's attributed journaled 64-bit file system. It makes use of BFS' attributes, indexes and "live queries" to make it as flexible as possible. With the IM Kit you can, for instance, search for all members of your family that are online and that by using the standard "Find" utility that you use to search files on your disk. You can also manage all the contacts using Tracker (the BeOS file manager and desktop). You can also see in the screenshot that the IM Kit even changes the icon color according to the user status and that change is, as expected, live.

Xandros 2.0 – An end to Windows? An adventure in Open source

I'm a windows user by nature, I've been playing around with Linux for a little while, I'm no Expert in any way but I've used quite a few distro's. The first distro I ever stuck with for any amount of time Was Xandros 1.0, which a friend provided for me. Except for the fact that it ran an old version of KDE it was perfect for me, but the old KDE crippled my work. Enter Xandros 2.0.

Richard Stallman on 20 years of GNU

Last week saw the 20th anniversary of Richard Stallman's decision to quit the MIT and start the GNU Project in 1984, with a goal to creating a platform using 'free' software that a user can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve: the GNU operating system which used widely today in its GNU/Linux form. A year later he founded the Free Software Foundation, a body that seeks to further the development and use of free software. He is also the author of the GNU General Public Licence, the licence under which free software can be distributed. Read his interview with Matt Whipp at PCPro.

Book Review: Spidering Hacks

"Spidering Hacks" by O'Reilly is targeted at everyone who wants to automate surfing the web and has a little bit of programming experience. Though each of the hacks in the book covers a particular topic, similar to books in the Cookbook series, there is also a lot of material that is generally applicable in each of them.