OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic

Submitted by Sagres 2003-08-04 Hardware 41 Comments

If your computer is having persistent stability problems, it may be bad RAM. Now that Windows is a bit more stable than it was back in the bad old days, Microsoft would like to give users a way to point the finger back at their own hardware if their computer is acting up. It released a memory diagnostic utility yesterday.

OSNews Speaks With Ximian’s Miguel de Icaza

Adam Scheinberg 2003-08-04 Original OSNews Interviews 60 Comments

The big news today is no doubt Novell's acquisition of Ximian, Inc. So it was that much more interesting to get the chance to speak to Ximian's lead primate, Miguel de Icaza, today and ask him some questions about Ximian, Novell, and their future.

Red Hat Files Complaint Against SCO

Submitted by walterbyrd 2003-08-04 Red Hat 127 Comments

"The purpose of this complaint is to demonstrate that Red Hat's technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO and to hold SCO accountable for its unfair and deceptive actions." The article is here. fuzzyping also points to this story.

Attorneys Criticial of SCO

Adam Scheinberg 2003-08-04 SCO 27 Comments

An anonymous contributor writes "An interesting legal commentary on SCO can be found at web page for the Law Office of Lewis A. Mettler which includes some highly critical comments about SCO, their actions, and their legal approach. Another attorney, Tom Carey warned that SCO needs to include some interesting terms in its new licenses. Otherwise, "SCO will have committed the business equivalent of extortion, assuming they lose their case against IBM..." Mark Radcliffe, from the same firm as Carey, although he appears to have some doubts about Eben Moglen's OSDL position paper, also points out some issues with SCO's position in the same article."

Novell Acquires Ximian

Submitted by Marc Schwartz 2003-08-04 Novell and Ximian 65 Comments

From the press release: "Novell, Inc., today announced it has acquired privately held Ximian® of Boston, Mass., the leading provider of desktop and server solutions that enable enterprise Linux adoption. This acquisition expands Novell's capacity to provide flexible information solutions to customers worldwide. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed." I happen to be a huge Novell and Ximian fan, so I can only imagine what they have in mind...

ZDNET: Microsoft Should Rewrite Windows

Submitted by Josh 2003-08-04 Windows 138 Comments

"Microsoft said last week it plans to hire 4,000 to 5,000 new workers and to increase research spending by about 8 percent, to $6.9 billion per year. The company also said it has $49 billion lying around collecting interest. So what should Bill and Steve do with these wondrous resources? My suggestion: Start over." It's radical, but interesting. Check out the rest on zdnet.

yellowTAB Announces ODBC Connectivity for Zeta

Submitted by Zeph 2003-08-04 Zeta 25 Comments

From their press release: "Now, yellowTAB presents a fully-functional, fully-featured implementation of ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) for Zeta! Both the API and the user interface for configuring ODBC connections is 100% compatible with the original Windows version and its UNIX clones."

Interview with Judd Vinet of Arch Linux

Submitted by ladislav 2003-08-04 Linux 17 Comments

"Arch Linux is one of those quiet and little-known distributions, rarely figuring in the headlines of major Linux news publications. Fortunately, the recent release of Arch Linux 0.5 and a continuously evolving changelog present enough proof that its developers and package maintainers are hard at work. Distrowatch speaks to Judd Vinet, the creator and lead developer of Arch Linux and its "pacman" software management utility about the origins of Arch Linux, its special features, plans and other topics related to the development of this fine distribution.

Q&A with Amiga CTO – Session 16

Mike Bouma 2003-08-03 Amiga & AROS 12 Comments

Fleecy Moss has answered 10 new Amiga community questions addressing various topics at the AmigaWorld.net portal. This week AmigaOS4 events are sheduled for New York and Denmark.

InceptionOS: A GNU/Linux Distribution

Submitted by Michael Lauzon 2003-08-02 Linux 58 Comments

InceptionOS, a Linux distribution aimed at full LSB compliance, but not based on an existing Linux distribution, is currently looking for people to participate in the creation of a new distribution. If you're interested, read on.

64-bit Linux: Ready for prime time?

Submitted by Wee Jin Goh 2003-08-02 Linux 24 Comments

With the arrival of the AMD Opteron and Intel Itanium, commodity servers built on these processors have joined proprietary RISC systems from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and others in the 64-bit landscape. With prices starting at just over $2,000, Opteron and Itanium systems — running Linux or Windows — are already carving out a niche in high-performance computing clusters, where they are used to run compute-intensive scientific- and financial-modeling applications. Eventually they will replace their 32-bit forebears in corporate datacenters, and clusters of them may even challenge 64-bit Unix systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. More at Infoworld.

Microsoft Site Brought Down by DDoS

Guest post by Beryllium 2003-08-02 Privacy, Security 88 Comments

For over an hour today, the Microsoft website was brought offline. Reports indicate that it was a standard Denial of Service attack, rather than an exploit in their hosting platform itself (Windows Server 2003, at last check). However, there is a certain likelyhood that the launch-points for this attack were themselves exploited Windows-based computers. The Department of Homeland Security today issued an unprecedented second warning regaring recent Windows exploits. Is this an isolated incident, or is it an ominous indication of pending cyber attacks on popular internet sites?

LinuxTag Show Report with Pictures

Guest post by Nicholas Blachford 2003-08-01 Linux 20 Comments

LinuxTag, Europe's largest Linux show was held from the 10th to the 13th of July 2003 in Karlsruhe Kongresszentrum, Germany. Myself and a colleague (Debian developer Sven Luther) were there for 3 of those days. The organisers took to the free software philosophy with some enthusiasm, the entrance is free but the downloadable ticket is supplied with LaTex source code! Then again this is the same organisation which, knowing German law didn't allow you to threaten legal action without proof told SCO to put up or shut up, SCO promptly shut up.

Guess What? Microsoft Won

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-01 Microsoft 138 Comments

CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says the "end of Microsoft as we know it" crowd must face the post-antitrust reality that the company is confident and stronger than ever.

Interview with Asa Dotzler of Mozilla

Submitted by jeremy 2003-08-01 Mozilla, Gecko 24 Comments

In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org Asa discusses the formation of the the Mozilla Foundation, the direction Mozilla is headed, Microsoft's decision to no longer offer IE as a standalone product, acceptance of the browser as a client interface to applications and more. Additionally, Mozilla 1.5A, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 and Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 were released recently.

XPde Team Releases XPde 0.4.0

Submitted by José León Serna 2003-08-01 Desktop environments 65 Comments

The XPde Team released XPde 0.4.0, a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. Check out the announcement, view the screenshots or read the detailed ChangeLog. Go to the downloads section to get the binaries and sources.

VectorLinux-4.0-rc1 Available

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-01 Linux 9 Comments

The VectorLinux project released 4.0-RC1, more information is available here.

Technoids Interviews Axel Dörfler, OpenBFS Creator

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-01 Haiku 25 Comments

The online German magazine Technoids features a long and interesting interview with Axel Dörfler, OpenBFS developer of the OpenBeOS project. The magazine can be downloaded in PDF format and it is in German language as of now (some translations are planned, hopefully english too). Update: In another interview, at BeOSJournal, Nathan discusses his personal life, loves and hates, and getting in shape so as not to end up like some programmers.

MSDN TV: 64-bit Common Language Runtime and the .NET Framework

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-01 .NET 15 Comments

The next release of the .NET Framework will include both 32- and 64-bit native support. Christopher Brown discusses how developers writing managed code today will be able to easily port and, in many cases, just copy existing applications to this new environment.

HP Taps Mandrake for Desktops

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-01 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 26 Comments

"For a Linux distribution, the soul is the Linux kernel, the brains are the GNU system services, and the look is a function of the desktop manager. So what differentiates one distribution from another? It’s about "feel" and that's no mean matter. For Mandrake the feel is overwhelmingly one of high security for business." Read the article at Open Mag.