Matrox Parhelia in Action
This is not exactly OS news, but they are definately interesting geek news. A lot of things have been said about Matrox Parhelia's inability to beat the GeForce4 Ti or the Radeon 8500 in pure FPS, however, also a lot have been said that the point of Parhelia is to offer some advanced 3D features and great rendering quality. This great quality and advanced features (like displacement mapping) can be seen in the first 12 screenshots of the Imperium Galactica III: Genesis web site. This game is the first to be released that it has been optimized for the Parhelia. Enjoy the view.
Limbo: A New Red Hat Linux Beta
Less than two months since the release of Red Hat Linux 7.3, Red Hat already released a 5-CD beta of their upcoming version of Red Hat Linux, codenamed Limbo. The beta includes Gnome 2.0, KDE 3.0.1, GCC 3.1, Mozilla 1.0, OpenOffice 1.0 and much more.
libferris Winds its Way Towards 1.0.0
libferris is a virtual filesystem (VFS) that runs in the user address space. This means that applications using libferris will use the shared libraries API to access the filesystem which may then delegate to the kernel using libc to perform the desired actions. Operating in the user address space allows libferris to mount things that one would generally not want the kernel to mount. For example libferris mount Berkeley database files, ftp sites, XML files, rpm files, sockets, sysv IPC, mysql databases and remote computers using ssh as a filesystem.
Apple’s Jaguar Leaps Ahead of Schedule
"The widely anticipated update to Apple Computer's Mac OS X will appear earlier than expected, sources say, which is good news for the company in a tough year." Read the report at News.com.
Review: LindowsOS Computer from Wal-Mart.com
"It was with great anticipation that I began looking at Wal-Mart's latest offering: a Microtel PC with LindowsOS preloaded. I had reviewed the OS-less Microtel computer from Wal-Mart a few weeks ago and I hoped that this, the first consumer-focused Linux-based PC to appear from a major U.S. retailer, would be a great product for Linux newbies. Unfortunately, no matter how much I try to like this system, I am not comfortable recommending it to novice users." Read the review at NewsForge.
Sun, Allies, Redial Java for Cell Phones
The company, along with Java backers, is preparing a new release of its Java software for cell phones that it hopes will prevent a splintering of the Java market and stave off rivals such as Microsoft. Read the report at News.com.
KDE 3.0.2 Released
The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0.2. KDE 3.0.2 primarily provides useability and stability enhancements over KDE 3.0.1, which shipped in late May 2002. The new KDE version also compiles with GCC 3.1, so it would be a great opportunity to build it manually for better perfomance (change the "i686" option with the kind of CPU you have).
A Quick Poll on Linux and X11 Environments
OSNews receives a lot of visitors every day, and while we try to equally report on all operating systems, including the commercial ones, most of our readership remains focused on open source. We have put together two polls for you, one to vote for your favorite Linux distribution and one of for your favorite X11 window manager or desktop environment. Read more and vote!
Mandrake: Why We Won’t Join UnitedLinux
"MandrakeSoft would gain nothing by joining United Linux, and doing so would damage our reputation. Joining United Linux could destroy many of the features that have made Mandrake Linux so widely popular, such as our "easy to install, easy to use" approach. It should be noted that several recent polls indicate that the four United Linux companies currently rank lower than Mandrake Linux in market share." Read the rest of the MandrakeSoft's position on UnitedLinux.
Shawn Gordon: KDE and Third-Party Applications
"Recently Dennis E. Powell wrote a commentary entitled "The future belongs to GNOME; inertia, to KDE" that has generated much feedback, and a lot of flames in the KDE community. From my perspective as a software company that was/is doing KDE specific applications I think I see where the fundamental disconnect is between the two, and in my discussions with a number of the core developers, they have substantiated my opinion on this." Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain.
SGI to Develop MIPS Chips for Origin, Onyx
"SGI is widely expected to make a statement of direction that will see the company push Itanium-based machines employing open source systems and middleware software along side its MIPS-based Origin servers and Onyx visualization systems (think of it as workstations created directly from slices of a parallel supercomputer and you'll get the right idea), which run the Irix variant of Unix." Read the story.
Pepper 4.0.5 Released for FreeBSD and Linux
Interview with XFree86’s David Dawes
David Dawes is maybe the most active XFree86 developer and he is also the lead founder of the project. He works for Tungsten Graphics, which is the main company working on the XFree, DRI and Mesa codebases today. We are happy to host an interview with David, discussing the present and future of XFree86 project. Update: Still confused how a VSYNCed desktop look like? Read here.
Regarding Jaguar’s Rendezvous/Zeroconf Technology
There's a new article on computer commentary site "The Idea Basket" detailing the features and importance of the Rendezvous networking protocol that will be shipping with next major release of Mac OS X. It should be a very interesting read for many computer users, as Rendezvous will profoundly affect the way people use their Macs as well as other computer systems in a networked setting.
Microsoft Rounds Out Dev. Languages With Launch of Visual J# .NET
Apple Drops Emagic Bombshell
"Apple dropped a bombshell on music makers today by acquiring Emagic which, with Steinberg, dominates the market for sequencing software. Apple said it will axe the Windows version of Emagic's Logic sequencer come September." Read the report at TheRegister.
Just Some OSNews Reminders
This is just a reminder about some OSNews-related stuff. First off, by reading the survey results, we saw that a lot of people were complaining about the popup ads, while these have completely stopped as of 2 weeks ago. Also, other people complained that OSNews does not look good on Lynx. OSNews looks pretty good on Lynx and w3m and Links and even AvantGo, while we even have WAP support (check screenshot on the above link). But you will need to read here first how to have these services working for you. Also, we are always looking for people to write articles for OSNews. These days we generally serve more than 40,000 page views per day, so this could be a good way to have your voice heard on OS and other technology-related matters.
KSE-MIII Merged Into FreeBSD-Current 5.0
Julian Elischer announced that Kernel Scheduled Entities - Milestone 3 (KSE-MIII) have been merged into the -current FreeBSD source tree. The KSE project is a major effort to allow for multi-threaded applications to scale and perform better, especially on SMP servers. The effort involves a considerable amount of re-working the various internal kernel data structures, and though not actually considered part of FreeBSD's "next generation" symmetric multiprocessing project (SMPng), each project greatly enhances the other. Read the full story over at KernelTrap.
From Windows 1.0 to Windows .NET Server
This article summarizes Microsoft's decades-long effort to evolve Windows from a single, one-size-fits-all desktop operating system for everyone into a robust family of server and desktop operating systems.