Solaris 9-x86 Review

  Submitted by Jem Matzan Solaris 39 Comments
Here's a review of Sun Solaris 9, x86 edition. It's no competition for GNU/Linux or FreeBSD on the desktop, but Solaris on x86 could make low-end IA32-based workstations available to people who previously needed to buy a SPARC machine to use Solaris software, says the author.
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Microsoft’s New Toll Road

Microsoft 69 Comments
Microsoft watchers have two interesting stories to follow this week. First is the new Intellectual Property (IP) licensing scheme. The second is a feverish round speculation (just a rumor) that Microsoft will buy AMD. Both tie into an older story about plans for the next generation Xbox.
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Slackware Introduction at DistroWatch

Slackware, Slax 44 Comments
"Slackware Linux is not your ordinary Linux distribution. For starters, it rarely figures in news headlines, preferring to keep a low profile instead. Its developers have stubbornly resisted any attempts to make their users' lives easier: the distribution provides no graphical configuration utilities, it's package management does not resolve dependencies and its simple, text-mode installer has undergone very few changes in years. Yet, Slackare Linux remains one of the top 5 Linux distributions in use today. What is the reason for its tight hold on many users?" Read the article at DistroWatch.
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Ximian’s Ettore Perazzoli Passes Away

  Submitted by Erick Woods Novell and Ximian 32 Comments
A well-known figure in the Gnome community, Ximian hacker Ettore Perazzoli passed away last night (here pictured at GUADEC 2001). We do not know the cause of the death, but the Ximian employees blog about the sad news here. This comes as a shock to many, especially as this is the second Ximian person to have passed away recently. Chema Celorio died exactly a month ago during a sky diving event. Our condolences to both families and to their friends at Ximian and Novell.
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An introduction to Microsoft’s Four .NET Programming Languages

  Submitted by Anonymous .NET 53 Comments
This article by Prashant Sridharan provides an introduction and overview of Microsoft's four .NET programming languages: Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual C# .NET, and Visual J#. According to the author, programming languages are used to build a variety of solutions, and each language contains unique features and benefits that make it best suited to certain kinds of applications. The article starts by explaining the overall benefits of .NET, and then reviews the unique capabilities and strengths each of these four Microsoft .NET programming languages.
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Holiday Shopping

Gifts, Contests 12 Comments
For all of you who plan to use the web for your holiday shopping, I wanted to let you know that we made some updates to the OSNews Price Comparison Shop. As always, you can find it on the left side of the site, under the ad or at osnews.pricegrabber.com. We now have a search field that will take you directly to a comparison of prices for the item that you enter. If you can't find what you're looking for at PG, you may want to try NewMobileComputing's Price Comparison, which is powered by Dealtime.
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FreeBSD 5.2-RC1 Released

FreeBSD 40 Comments
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures.
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Eye on performance: Micro performance benchmarking

  Submitted by Frank Java 11 Comments
Performance enthusiasts Jack Shirazi & Kirk Pepperdine, Director & CTO of JavaPerformanceTuning, follow performance discussions all over the Internet to see what's troubling Java developers. While surfing the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.java, they came across some interesting low-level performance tuning questions. In this installment of Eye on performance, they dive into some bytecode analysis to try and answer some of these questions.
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Lindows.com Launches ChoicePC Program

Linspire 51 Comments
Lindows.com, in an effort to combat Microsoft's sway in the internation PC market, has organized a new initiative, ChoicePC. ChoicePC will fund efforts to diversify the OS market (more info on this available in the latest Michael's Minutes). For $100, a user can get a lifetime membership to Lindows.com, including a free download of all future releases of LindowsOS, a lifetime membership to the Click N Run Warehouse, and more. Certainly a good deal with the price of commercial Linux rising. Update: Justification.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server 3.0 Review

Red Hat 39 Comments
When I volunteered to do this review I quickly realized that I was asked to review 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server' and not just 'Red Hat Linux'. Then panic set in. How different was this going to be from regular old Red Hat that I've used and relied on for years? Is this going to be a whole new Red Hat with a whole bunch of advanced features that I wouldn't be able to talk about either because I missed them or because I'm not qualified?
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