When Microsoft pulls the plug on Windows 98 support next Friday, it will offer a free CD designed to help users "make the most" of the aging operating system, without any further assistance from the software giant.
Here is another scheduled release of the GNOME Platform Bindings, which provide a GNOME development platform for programming languages other than C, in the style of those languages.
This month is the 20th anniversary of Apple Computer's Macintosh. To mark the occasion, Wired News is running several stories this week about the groundbreaking machine, the people who created it and the Mac's impact on computing and culture in general.
DragonFly BSD was announced in July of this year, with Matt Dillon the originator and main weightlifter of this project. Development has been proceeding at a good clip, with a first release expected in 2004. Here's some data on the amount of activity in the DragonFly source, as of the end of December 2003.
KDE project is planning on announcing QtGTK library which was written by one of its core developers. The library integrates Qt event loop with GNOME. Thanks to that whole KDE framework can be used from any GTK+ application just like it would be a native part of it. The library itself is already available here. There seems to be also a tutorial on how to use it here. Reportedly Gimp already works with it.
This article discusses a small-scale benchmark test run on nine modern computer languages or variants: Java 1.3.1, Java 1.4.2, C compiled with gcc 3.3.1, Python 2.3.2, Python compiled with Psyco 1.1.1, and the four languages supported by Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003 development environment: Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual J#. The benchmark tests arithmetic and trigonometric functions using a variety of data types, and also tests simple file I/O. All tests took place on a Pentium 4-based computer running Windows XP. Update: Delphi version of the benchmark here.
Xandros does Linux sans Tux, but the big question remains: Does being fast, easy, and astonishingly elegant buy it success on a down and dirty desktop? Asks Open Magazine.
Xfce is an easy-to-use and easy-to-configure environment for X11 based on GTK2. In 4.0.3 a leak in the window manager was fixed, so upgrading is highly recommended. Various file manager bugs were fixed. Translation updates were made. Support for the KDE system tray was added.
It seems that I am in some sort of retro-mode. As Linux on the desktop is getting bigger and better, with more apps, more sleek looks (Galaxy, Keramik and Blue Curve for example) and more idiot proof, I am going onto simpler, more condensed stuff. The big distributions are nice, but I really do not need all the applications that come with them all the time.
NetBSD's Luke Mewburn announced today that it is now possible to cross-build XFree86 4.x on NetBSD-current
using the "build.sh" framework, taking advantage of such features as: cross compilation, read-only source tree, unprivileged builds. You can find more details about the build.sh framework in Luke Mewburn and Matthew Green's paper and presentation on the topic at BSDCon 2003.
Windows Server 2003 for 64-Bit Extended Systems provides high performance for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system. The underlying architecture is based on 64-bit extensions to the industry-standard x86 instruction set, allowing today's 32-bit applications to run natively on 64-bit extended processors such as AMD Opteron. At the same time, new 64-bit applications are executed in 64-bit mode, which processes more data per clock cycle, allows greater access to memory, and speeds numeric calculations. Read the newly published information here.
Gates' keynote address features new Media Center technologies, MSN Services and smart watches for MSN Direct; Gates highlights growing role of software in consumer electronics. Here is the web siet for the newly announced Media Center Devices.
Members of the "xbox-windows project" recently announced that Windows CE .NET is now booting on the Xbox. "Currently, we have a partial BSP for CE .NET 4.20, and working PCI, USB, Display, and Mouse drivers. Most of the "important" parts of the BSP are done, however some features are still lacking or bug ridden. We also have a simple, preliminary bootloader based on xbeboot from the xbox-linux project. With these in place, CE loads and runs properly, but is not yet very useful." WindowsForDevices contacted the project's originator, who prefers to be known by the pseudonym "Artifex", to gain insight into the project's origins, goals, and plans for the future. The result is this interview.
"Overall, and more so for its targeted market, Xandros 2.0 is a very well thought out and put together distribution. That's not to say Xandros is perfect, or perfect for everyone, but it is an excellent place to start for people coming from Windows who want to use Linux and don't care about learning all the interworkings of the operating system."Read the review at LinuxReview.
Some say that Microsoft's major markets are mature and saturated. What lies ahead for the software giant? A retrospective and overview on the issue here.
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.
"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.
