OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

ARM Port Xscale Optimizations on NetBSD; AMD64 Crossbuilding

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-18 NetBSD 11 Comments

NetBSD's Steve Woodford announces that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. NetBSD/arm is a collective term for NetBSD running on systems based on ARM Ltd's ARM architecture. Also, NetBSD's Frank van der Linden announced that he has added gdb support to the tree, as a result the NetBSD/amd64 port is now completely crossbuildable. NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors.

OpenBSD-Current: High Availability and Load Balancing

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-18 OpenBSD 1 Comment

An excellent feature has just been committed to OpenBSD-current : pfsync and now CARP. OpenBSD now adds high availability to security. In the meantime, the OpenBSD 3.4 CDs have begin to ship.

Sun Gives Glimpse of Revised Solaris TCP/IP Stack

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-18 Solaris 33 Comments

Sun Microsystems' new Software Express program is alive and kicking with the company delivering a rewritten TCP/IP stack for Solaris that is meant to prepare customers for faster networking technology.

Iyonix DVD video playback for Risc OS

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-18 RISC OS 8 Comments

The team that brought RISC OS Aemulor has another killer app this autumn for the Risc OS users - Cino: The Iyonix DVD player. Read more Risc OS news at Drobe and IconBar.

Linux: 2.6.0-test8 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-18 Linux 21 Comments

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released 2.6.0-test8. He listed the most noticeable changes as fixes for: the '/proc/PID/stat' oops, the Athlong prefetch bug causing occasional spurious page faults, serverworks PIO autotuning, cpufreguency calculations and NFS O_DIRECT. Read the changelog at KernelTrap.

Software Engineers – the Ultimate Brain Scientists?

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-18 Geek stuff 31 Comments

"The most famous engineering brain models are "Neural Networks" and "Parallel Distributed Processing." Unfortunately both have failed as engineering models and as brain models, because they make certain assumptions about what a brain should look like." Read the article at TheRegister.

GCC 3.3.2 Released; Ported to WinCE

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-17 General Development 12 Comments

GCC 3.3.2 includes numerous new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Grab it here. Additionally, this interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform.

Cinebench Benchmarks: Intel, AMD Vs G5 2GHz MP

Submitted by Kelly McNeill 2003-10-17 Benchmarks 62 Comments

BareFeats has compiled the results of a comparative test utilizing Cinebenc, the best cross-platform benchmarking application the market has to offer.It is interesting to see how the MP 2GHz Opteron and Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz MT compared against the MP 2GHz G5. Here is also a previous benchmark session at Barefeats which was updated recently.

On Longhorn’s Long Delays

Guest post by John O\'Sullivan 2003-10-17 Editorial 78 Comments

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981. "64 bit is coming to desktops,there is no doubt about that, But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology." It seems to me that by the time it ships, Longhorn will need 4 gigs of RAM.

Microsoft Clears its Own XP SP2 Confusion

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-17 Windows 17 Comments

Just three days after a Microsoft vice president--who is in charge of Microsoft.com and Windows Update--told thousands of delegates at a conference in Florida that Service Pack 2 for Windows XP would be available by the end of 2003, the company has effectively retracted the comments and said that customers will see only a beta version of SP2 this year. In the meantime, Microsoft debuts first Windows XP Security Pack.

Comprehensive Review of FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE

Submitted by Jem Matzan 2003-10-17 FreeBSD 41 Comments

There's a review of FreeBSD 5.1 at The Jem Report. It's a comprehensive review and offers a quick comparison with GNU/Linux.

Legal Impact on Windows/Linux Look-alikes

Submitted by José León Serna 2003-10-17 Legal 42 Comments

The XPde team has released a document on the legal impact of releasing Windows "lookalike" user interfaces in, specifically, Free Software.

First Impressions of iTunes for Windows

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-16 Multimedia, AV 395 Comments

Apple's iTunes 4.1.0.52 for Windows was released today. I downloaded it a few hours ago, and so here are my first impressions on the product. Screenshots included.

Gnome 2.4 and File Associations

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-16 Gnome 32 Comments

" I learned about Dropline Gnome, an optimized Gnome installation for Slackware. Anyway, the upshot was that my Gnome system was upgraded, my personal settings were retained but my Open Office file associations were broken. I could no longer open documents in Nautilus with an Open Office application." Read the tutorial at Linux-Universe.

Pegasos II PowerPC System Announced

Submitted by oGALAXYo 2003-10-16 Morphos 34 Comments

As shown here Genesi has announced the Pegasos II Systems. Get a closer look and enjoy.

The GNU/Fiwix Operating System

Guest post by Jordi Sanfeliu 2003-10-16 OS News 27 Comments

The GNU/Fiwix project began during the summer of 1997. In fact, even before than I had running around my head the idea to design and implement a new UNIX-like operating system. But it was not until 1997 that it started to become a reality.

SkyOS Integrates Preference Panels

Eugenia Loli 2003-10-16 SkyOS 18 Comments

All applications which were used to configure settings like graphic, audio, themes, network, devices, keyboard etc. on SkyOS were rewritten as DLLs and are accessible through one application now: the System manager. Check here for two screenshots too.

Remembering Multics

Submitted by Kelly McNeill 2003-10-16 OS News 9 Comments

Individuals who know what "Multics" is, raise your hand. Now, all individuals who know what a "Multician" is, raise the other hand. (Now lower your hands. Your coworkers are going to think you're a psychopath staring at your computer with your hands above your head.) For those without hands up, Multics is a historic 1965-2002-era operating system, which had a dramatic influence on computers as we know them today. osViews editorial contributor Kelly McNeill, authored an insightful and educational piece about the historic Multics operating system.

AmigaOne Review and Videos

Mike Bouma 2003-10-16 Amiga & AROS 11 Comments

AmigaOS4 beta-tester Elwood has written an AmigaOne review which includes some videos, including one of the alpha version of AmigaOS4 booting on his AmigaOne. Also NeRP recently uploaded a screenshot. And here is Amiga CTO's 21st Q&A session.

Bounty Hunters Search for Proprietary Code

Submitted by proclus 2003-10-16 BSD & Darwin 9 Comments

Find non-free code at GNU-Darwin, and get a reward from RMS. In preparation for this initiative, the team has greatly improved the software freedom status and GPL compliance of the newest free OS including the ports system, packages, on-line, and hard media offerings. It appears that the FSF wants GNU-Darwin to stay free. As always, many thanks to them, especially RMS, D. E. Evans, Eben Moglen, etc. It feels great to do the right thing, and that GNU-Darwin is finally inside the free software circle. There is also a longer article about this at Advogato.