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Interview with Autopackage’s Project Leader

General Development 19 Comments
NewsForge hosts an interview with Autopackage's project leader Mike Hearn. The idea around Autopackage is to come up with a single software packaging/installation system that will work across all major Linux distributions, and resolve dependencies, too, so that neither developers nor users need to worry about distribution compatibility issues. OSNews hosted recently a feature article about the project.
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Yoper Ydesktop V1 Release Announced

  Submitted by Stefanos Titanas Linux 67 Comments
"Today is a great day for PC users, both personal and business alike, and a great day for the PC industry with the launch of Yoper - Your Operating System," reads the bombastic release announcement for Yoper V1. Yoper (Your Perfect Operating System) is a lean and fast Linux distribution with an endearing superiority complex. This is the debut release of Ydesktop, which is aimed at workstation/desktop or terminal server use. See more at Yoper.com.
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Switching to Linux – One User’s Story

Linux 60 Comments
"Pennsylvania attorney Kevin L. Ritchey has written an open letter about using Linux on the desktop -- from the user's perspective. Ritchey chronicles his successful switch to Linux, laments a few features still in need of improvement, and offers us his opinions as an average daily user of Desktop Linux. Ritchey did not make a switch because of cost or philosophical reasons -- rather he moved to Linux because it worked better and was more productive." Read it at DesktopLinux.com.
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Ex-Be/Palm Executive Rejoins Apple; Should Apple Embrace USB 2.0?

  Submitted by Yves R. Crevecoeur Apple 56 Comments
The Mac Observer has posted a reader poll and commentary on the topic of whether Apple should embrace USB 2. Commentary at AppleLinks. In other Apple news, Apple is preparing on launching an online music service. Also, longtime hardware developer Steve Sakoman, a former Palm and Be executive, has rejoined Apple Computer as a vice president. Mr Sakoman was involved in the Mac II development and was the main guy behind the creation of the Newton. At Be, he designed the first generation H0bbit-based BeBox, the one that had 5 AT&T CPUs, back in the early days of Be. He later left and when he came back became Be's CTO.
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Windows Server 2003 Supports AMD x86-64

  Submitted by Dennis Baptista Windows 13 Comments
"An even bigger endorsement comes from Microsoft Corp., which will begin shipping a 64-bit Windows server operating system for Opteron ahead of the chip's launch. And in a break from the company's traditional hand-in-hand relationship with Intel, Microsoft execs are talking up Opteron. They say the AMD chip helps companies that want to move at their own speed. "With 64 bits, some customers are going to want to ease into it," says Bob O'Brien, group product manager for Windows Server 2003." Read the article at BusinessWeek.
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Reading The Apple Patent Tea Leaves

Apple 85 Comments
"Apple has been busy patenting everything under the sun it seems, and some of those patents may promise interesting things to come. Others might make you stop, scratch your head and ask "huh, you can do that?" If you want to see the full list of Apple's published patents and pending patent applications, just visit the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). For those that don't crave reading through hundreds of patents, here's a quick patent round-up of user interface, program, hardware, and otherwise interesting developments from Apple." Read the article at MacObserver.
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Hyperthreading Technology and Digital Multimedia

Intel 32 Comments
Digital media applications are unique in that they can generally consume all the performance they can get. Unlike other tasks that execute in a few seconds, the rendering of stills, audio and video can take several minutes or even hours. Applications in the digital media space can translate increases in performance to increases in end-user productivity, and it is therefore beneficial for them to take advantage of the latest platform technologies.
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LindowsOS 3.0 Review

Linspire 15 Comments
"Publishing this article has been avoided for quite some time. The emotions behind LindowsOS is simply too great for objectivity to be used for both Tux Reports reviewers and for readers. We've witnessed flame wars in forums, mean-spirited posts in response to positive statements regarding LindowsOS, and we've fallen prey to our own biases regarding this distribution. However, after using the product we now believe that we can give a brief look at some of our experiences in relation to our expectations and then help others sort out some of the underlying controversy they may have read on other sites." Read the review at TuxReports.
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LynuxWorks Releases First Complete Solution for DO-178B RTOS

OS News 1 Comment
"LynuxWorks today introduced LynxOS-178, a commercially available DO-178B level A certifiable (FAA standard), real-time operating system (RTOS) that meets the stringent standards for safety-critical systems. LynxOS-178 originated from a partnership between Rockwell Collins and LynuxWorks. Rockwell Collins made several enhancements to the original LynxOS product and created the Rockwell Collins' Virtual Machine Operating System (VMOS)." Read the rest of the press release here.
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Linus Torvalds: The Benevolent, Brilliant Keeper of the Kernel

Linux 35 Comments
"The Linux kernel project is growing up. New contributors, job delegation, and a source code control system have changed the way the kernel gets hacked. The guy at the center of it all -- Linus Torvalds -- has changed, too. Gone are his days as poster boy for Open Source. He doesn't do Comdex keynotes anymore; he's not on the covers of business magazines; and he rarely gives interviews. No, these days, Linus is all about what he does best: hacking the kernel and keeping a sure and steady hand on the rudder of everyone's favorite project." Read the interview at Linux-Mag.com.
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QT 3.1.2 and QT# 0.7 Released

Qt 7 Comments
Maintenance release of the multiplatform toolkit, QT, was released, version 3.1.2. Also, a maintenance release of QT# was released also, version 0.7, and it works with Mono, GNU's Portable.NET and Microsoft's .NET. The main improvements over 0.6 are an easier build system, improvements in the demo apps, unicode support, and support for slots that take a QString parameter.
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Update on the 12″ Powerbook Review; Altitude Problems?

Apple 110 Comments
OSNews featured two reviews of the new 12" Powerbook from Apple last month. Using a machine and more fairly evaluating it, is a continuous process, so when new facts emerge, we should be reporting them back. So, what I discovered this weekend is that my 12" Powerbook doesn't like... the mountains. Read on, it is an interesting issue. Update: The issue is now logged at Apple's tech support db.
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FreeBSD 4.8-RC1 Available

FreeBSD 25 Comments
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely announces that FreeBSD 4.8-RC1 i386 mini ISO and FTP installation directory are on ftp-master. He says that the Alpha release will be available shortly. The plan is to make FreeBSD 4.8 available only for i386 and alpha platforms. Subsequent 5.1+ releases will have FreeBSD available for all platforms including sparc64, ia64, etc. Read the announcement at BSDForums.org.
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