The Future of Computing Part 4: The Next Dimension

Editorial 32 Comments
No, I'm not going all "New Age" on you, this time I'm looking at how computers are going to get a 3rd dimension and how this will change the way we interact with them. The previous parts of this series have been based on extrapolations or previous history. This time I'm looking further forward, when technologies currently in long term development become available and open up a whole new realm of possibilities.
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Mandrake Fined and Forced to Change Name

  Submitted by Robert Blake Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 97 Comments
Not one to buck the trend, Mandrakesoft have been fined €70,000 and told to change its name by a French court after a case brought by King Feature Syndicate of America, who own the trademark of "Mandrake the Magician" There have been no clues yet to what they'll change their name to, but for those who can read French, there's an article by the french IT news site Le Monde Informatique here. Update: MandrakeSoft has a suspensive appeal that could last 3 years, at least, and until a new trial they can keep their rights and domain names.
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Introducing the Visual Component Framework article on DevChannel

  Submitted by TioHoltzman General Development 16 Comments
An article about the Visual Component Framework was posted on DevChannel (here and here) a few weeks ago that developers on Slashdot might be interested in. It introduces the Visual Component Framework, a relatively new (project has been in progress for around 3 years) C++ application framework. Built to target Win32 systems first, it is now in the process of being ported to linux (using GTK) and OS X (using Carbon).
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SCO Roundup: Is The End In Sight?

SCO 37 Comments
As if the SCO Group doesn't have their hands full with the MyDoom worm, recent updates in the Linux lawsuits have caused quite a stir. The folks at Groklaw have transcribed all of the documentation in which SCO details the code they claim to own. But now it looks like SCO's argument, which is based on their definition of "derivative code," may be contradicted by AT&T, who not only wrote the original code, but wrote about this exact scenario in $echo ...in 1985!
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A Customer-Driven Approach to Open Software: “Community Code”

Open Source 50 Comments
The Open Source model – and by Open Source we mean products that adhere to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) guidelines – doesn't, and may never, work for many important software domains. All religious fervor aside, this is a reality because customers say so. We may want it to be otherwise, but the ultimate arbiters in the Open Source versus proprietary debate are customers.
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Open Carpet 0.2 Released

Novell and Ximian 8 Comments
Joe Shaw from Ximian released recently Open Carpet 0.2: This new version fixes some problems with multiple channels and now requires that the user supply the ChannelID directive in the channel config. Hopefully, enthusiasts around the world will join Joe in the developments of Open Carpet to add more functionality and support for more package formats (e.g. Slackware's, Solaris' or FreeBSD's) that will result to a nice, portable, package management front-end application for Unix and Linux.
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ekkoBSD Beta-2 Released

BSD & Darwin 15 Comments
ekkoBSD as a core OS offers security, stability, and flexability to your infrastructure. Feature enhancements include ekkoBSD native binaries, new fdialog features, fetch/libfetch, new applications in bin/sbin, and a new installation guide. The GUI installer (EINSTein) is still not functional in this release.
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Linux on Laptops Part II: Libranet 2.8.1

Debian 50 Comments
I considered reviewing Debian for this article. I downloaded a copy of Debian 3.0r2, making sure to get the disk with the 2.4 kernel. Everything you've heard about Debian being difficult to install? It's not totally true, but it's pretty close. I really wanted to try Debian, though, if only to use the vaunted apt-get system. I'd tried apt-rpm on a previous Red Hat installation, and it was great. Since Debian was turning out to be too difficult to put together, I decided to look for a debian-based distro.
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