OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Enlightenment DR17 Sees Yet Another Rewrite

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 Desktop environments 54 Comments

While DR-16.6-pre7 is out, the much anticipated for years now X desktop environment Enlightenment, sees yet another scrapping of code and rewrite. The team scrapped Ebits and all the applications that depend on it and started development of Edje, its replacement. You can read the rest of the saga here.

NetWare, Plans Products Using Ximian Code

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 Novell and Ximian 12 Comments

Novell is delaying shipment of its much anticipated Linux services for NetWare product until the end of this year, due to a decision to integrate software code from Ximian, a recently acquired ISV that is very active in the Linux space.

First Pictures of AmigaOne-Lite Motherboard

Mike Bouma 2003-09-18 Amiga & AROS 29 Comments

Some first pictures of the soon to be released Mini-ITX form factor AmigaOne PPC board have been released here. A round up of recent AmigaOS4 news: Pagestream to support AmigaOS4, AOS4 Tour goes downunder and Amiga recently released another CAM article "ExecSG in detail: Memory" written by Thomas Frieden of Hyperion.

Openwave Announces Phone Suite V7 for Linux-based Phones

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 Wireless 10 Comments

Openwave Systems Inc. the "leading independent provider of open software products and services for the mobile communications industry", today announced the availability of Openwave Phone Suite Version 7 (V7) for Linux at the DEMOmobile 2003 conference.

Can Sun Become the Dell of Enterprise Software?

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 Oracle and SUN 18 Comments

"Sun finally unveiled the full dimensions of its quest to change the computing landscape this week. It's fundamentally a more monolithic landscape populated by pre-integrated components either acquired by or developed by Sun. It's an alternative to Microsoft Windows abstracted from the operating systems (Solaris and Linux) and processors (SPARC and x86). It's also Sun's attempt to become a leading solutions provider competing against IBM, HP and Microsoft." Read the editorial at ZDNews.

Gates, Mills Tout Web Services Breakthrough

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 In the News 16 Comments

Bill Gates and IBM Software chief Steve Mills joined together to give an update on their companies' combined work in advancing Web services.

A Chat with the Inventor of the Computer Mouse

David Adams 2003-09-18 Hardware 16 Comments

Doug Englebart worked on a project for Stanford Research Institute to develop a manual method for manipulating data on a computer screen in 1963, with a grant from NASA. He'd been mulling over the idea since 1951. Bill English, who actually built the mouse (out of wood) based on Englebart's design, later moved to Xerox PARC, and refined the invention. It took a long time to catch on. Most people never heard of a computer mouse until Apple debuted the Macintosh in the 80's. And nobody can remember who first called it a "mouse."

Microsoft Ups Competition With Linux

Adam Scheinberg 2003-09-18 Windows 124 Comments

With the push of a new campaign, Tools to Compete, Microsoft has effectively admitted that they see Linux as a legitimate threat. Even with the massive reduction in the cost of Windows in big deals, Microsoft has still lost customers. It almost causes one to ask - a passing trend, or the beginning of the end?

Slackware Linux 9.1 Beta 2 Available

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 Slackware, Slax 30 Comments

Slackware 9.1-beta2 is ready for testing, changelog here. The second beta includes security fixes for OpenSSH/Sendmail, updates to GNOME 2.4.0, Galeon 1.3.9, GNOME Office 1.0, KDE 3.1.4 while XFree86 was also updated. Here is a ready-made unofficial ISO of yesterday's Slackware.

Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-18 Linux 20 Comments

DistroWatch reports that Terra Soft Solutions has updated its Yellow Dog Linux product to version 3.0.1: "Yellow Dog Linux v3.0.1 ships with all errata as of 2003/09/04, kernel 2.4.22 (Xserve rev2, PowerBook 17" rev1 sans fan support), and improved installer (no more dual drive bug!). Available now from the Terra Soft Store and YDL.net Enhanced accounts." See the announcement on the distribution's home page and the YDL 3.0 errata page for further details. Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.1 is available from the Terra Soft Store from US$25 or to members of the US$5-per-month YDL.net Enhanced subscription service.

Sun to Soup Up Solaris

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-17 Solaris 23 Comments

Sun Microsystems Inc. is readying a series of new features for its Solaris OS, some of which will become available to participants in its early-access program in the next three to four months. Elsewhere, Scott McNealy and company are trying to change the business model for software and in the process revive Sun’s prospects, Fortune Magazine is noticing.

Athene 3.2 Available; Overcomes X11 Speed Constraints

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-17 OS News 34 Comments

Athene 3.2 is now available for download. In conjunction with this release a port of SDL is available, along with a number of games at rocklytefiles.com. ZTerm has also been upgraded to provide full terminal emulation and is now installed by default in the 3.2 release. Rocklyte Systems also announced that the latest release of the freely distributed Athene for X11 overcomes one of the X Window System's most pressing speed constraints. Testing of the new release demonstrates graphics throughput approximately twice as fast as previous releases of Athene, by bypassing conventional X11 programming techniques and using the 'shared imaging' hack to copy graphics to the X video display.

SuSE Linux Professional 8.2 Review

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-17 SuSE, openSUSE 16 Comments

An easy and smart install, abundant documentation and plenty of configuration options make SuSE 8.2 ideal for the desktop, LinuxJournal says.

Sun Embraces Open-Source Database, Berkeley DB

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-17 Databases 14 Comments

Sleepycat Software Inc. will announce on Wednesday that Sun, has chosen Sleepycat's Berkeley DB database as the embedded database within its software line. The database is incorporated in key components of the Sun Java Enterprise System, formerly known as Project Orion, and the Sun Java Enterprise Desktop System, formerly known as Project Mad Hatter, both launched on Tuesday.

Documenting Source Code

Submitted by Frequent Reader 2003-09-17 General Development 46 Comments

Jef Raskin (former Apple developer) has written a critique of the current state of Integrated Development Environments. He notes that programmers have been struggling with the same problems for 30 years, and although new IDEs have simplified many tasks, many are still a usability nightmare, noting, "most current IDEs make adding comments difficult, sometimes painful: You often have to wrap comments by hand, discouraging paragraph-length explanations, or at least discouraging their editing. It is incredible to see antediluvian interfaces in 21st-century products."

FreeBSD 4.9, 5.x Release Engineering Status Report

Submitted by CooCooCaChoo 2003-09-17 FreeBSD 14 Comments

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long provides a status report for FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.x. He says that FreeBSD 4.9 Release will be pushed back a few weeks until instability reports are tracked down. FreeBSD 5-stable roadmap document received a major overhaul - among the highlights, KSE is progressing extremely well and is no longer a major source of concern for 5-stable. Stability is also at a very good level.

IM Services Lock Out 3rd Parties

David Adams 2003-09-17 Internet 58 Comments

First it was MSN Messenger, now Yahoo Messenger is threatening to lock out 3rd party instant messaging apps like Trillian, Proteus, and Gaim. It's been an ironic and pleasant fact that users of alternative operating systems have had nice, multi-funtional instant messaging applications, while most Windows users didn't even know they could bypass the official clients. That era may be coming to an end, as the big IM services are starting to lock out the 3rd party apps. What will this mean for alternative platforms?

Xbox Update Squeezes Out Linux

David Adams 2003-09-17 Games 52 Comments

Internet-connected Xbox units are phoning home to Microsoft and downloading a patch that closes the loophole that the Xbox Linux Project was exploiting to get Linux running on the Microsoft-built game machine. The patch may also delete "foreign" files that the Xbox Linux users install on the machine. There is some evidence that even if Xbox users don't enable the "Xbox Live" settings, some games also can connect to the internet and transmit information back to Microsoft.

NewsForge: First look at Sun’s New Desktop

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-17 Oracle and SUN 35 Comments

Chris Gulker is offering a first look of Sun's new desktop OS, dubbed "Java Desktop System", for NewsForge. Yesterday, OSNews also published its first impressions on the Linux-based OS.

Borland is Embracing wxWindows

Submitted by Sean Long 2003-09-17 General Development 42 Comments

According to this, Borland is using wxWindows as the C++ framework for their upcoming C++ BuilderX product. Borland will be committing changes back to the open source wxWindows project.