A Review of Knoppix

When Knoppix was first released it was heralded as revolutionary in the Linux world. Its autodetection and configuration capabilities were unsurpassed. Many of my colleagues remarked that if 'KNOPPIX can't do it, Linux can't do it'. Theoretically, one would be able to get a Knoppix CD, pop it into an arbitrary system, run it, save one's data to a partition, USB stick, etc....), reboot and the existing system would be left completely as it was before the CD was placed in the system.

Simple FreeBSD Installation Yields Functional Desktop System

"The FreeBSD installation process requires what many Windows users would likely call "a lot of command-line interaction." Coming from a Windows environment to something like FreeBSD takes a bit of getting used to, if you have to install the operating system yourself. If you're slightly above average in experience, I'd say go for it; you'll like it, and you should have no trouble to speak of." Read the installation overview at NewsForge.

Spawn of Debian faceoff: LindowsOS 4.5

"I've heard a lot of negatives about LindowsOS since its debut. I've heard the installation procedure encourages users to run as root, and worse, to do so without a password. I've heard the company doesn't adhere to the GPL by providing access to the source code for LindowsOS. I've also heard the company didn't play nice with others at a desktop Linux trade show last year. From personal experience I know company reps are a lot more eager to talk to the Windows trade press than to the Linux press." Read the review at NewsForge by Joe Barr.

C coding tip: Self-manage data buffer memory

The C programming language defines two standard memory management functions: malloc() and free(). C programmers frequently use those functions to allocate buffers at run time to pass data between functions. In many situations, however, you cannot predetermine the actual sizes required for the buffers, which may cause several fundamental problems for constructing complex C programs. This article advocates a self-managing, abstract data buffer. It outlines a pseudo-C implementation of the abstract buffer and details the advantages of adopting this mechanism.

Apple Previews Xgrid Technology

Apple today previewed Xgrid, a computational clustering technology from Apple’s Advanced Computation Group (ACG). Xgrid helps scientists and others working in compute intensive environments to fully utilize all IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid enabled "virtual" IT environment that takes advantage of unused computing capacity to run batch and workload processing.

Xandros 2.0 – King of the Linux Desktop

"The recent release of Xandros Linux 2.0 marks an important milestone in the company's short history. Not only is the Linux desktop market growing and changing in ways we never imagined, but the inner workings of the distro have been completely updated to more modern standards. Xandros has caught up with the rest of the Linux world and things couldn't be better. In this market, they should turn into a major contender for the Windows conversion revolution." Read MadPenguin's review here, ours is here.

Firebird V1.5 RC-8; SAP/DB2 on Sun Cluster 3.X

Firebird 1.5 Linux CS RC8 released. This RC has many small enhancements in install procedure made by Mark O'Donohue and it should install more "smoothly". Additionally, this is the first RC built with external debug info which you can download separately.

Mandrake Linux 10 Preview

Mandrake Linux 10.0-preview edition pretty much defines the shape of things to come in Linux land in 2004. With Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2 beta and XFree86 4.4 beta, it doesn't leave much to be desired. This article refers to cooker snapshot as of December 31, 2003. Please note that this release is not a beta release. This is not even an alpha release. Its just something put together to show what we can expect from Mandrake 10.0. This release comes on only two CDs so some of the packages are missing. And as there are bound to be lot of bugs in this kind of release, I'll be concentrating more on the usability aspect. So let's see if it is worth drooling over.