FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely says that a number of the issues brought up with FreeBSD 4.9 RC2 have been resolved, and the latest release candidate (RC3) is now available for i386.
PalmSource's CEO David Nagel faces questions about his claims that the company is in talks to license PalmOS to SonyEricsson. The handset manufacturer has flatly denied any such talks are taking place. SonyEricsson would represent a major win for Nagel's PalmSource licensing operation.
SuSE has updated their site with features of the new SuSE Linux 9.0. Additionally, they released a Live CD based on the 9.0 version (it's the RC-1). Mirrors here.
"Several weeks ago, we cocked a collective eyebrow at Sun. When executive VP Jonathan Schwartz said "we do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period," we didn't have much of a choice. Our read on the statement was that it was more than a little hyperbolic, perhaps fueled by bitterness at Linux making lunch meat of Solaris x86."Read the article at ServerWatch.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
"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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
" 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.
