A new study predicts that Linux will take over low-end servers and share the spotlight with .Net in high-end servers. Plus, hardware heavyweights HP, IBM and Sun--will lose out.
When it comes time for you to buy toys for all the good little boys and girls on your shopping list, don't forget OSNews' price comparison engine. It will help you find the best price on electronics and computer stuff, even factoring in shipping charges. There's even a new feature that allows you to search for mail-in rebate information. If you've never used the price comparison engine before, give it a try, and let us know what you think.
"Slackware 8.1 is a four-disk set. The first disk in the set is the only one you really, absolutely need to install Linux. The second CD is a live filesystem CD that can be used to boot into Linux without installation. Disks three and four contain source code and the "contribs" — software that's not part of the main distribution, but that you might want anyway."Read the review at UnixReview.
One of the great difficulties a hobbyist programmer faces when trying to start the development of his own OS is finding out where to start. Many books describe in-depth theoretical OS concepts, yet noone seems to take a hobyist programmer by the hand and bring him face to face with these concepts. This is precisely what this article aims at doing.
Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik said Microsoft's legal efforts to challenge open source by employing patent infringement law represent a big threat. "It's a credible threat, no doubt about it," said Szulik. "We see the threat of costs of litigation could be harmful, cause a disenfranchisement of the global collaborative community and disrupt the speed of innovation. Yes, I think it's quite credible." Read the report at CRN.
Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.
"Version 4 of MySQL has been in development since 2001. By the time you read this, MySQL 4.0 should be a stable release (or at least be in late-beta -- not finished yet, but still quite suitable for development work that you expect to deploy later this year)."Read the article at LinuxMag. On other database news, mSQL 3.3 was released.
"In my previous article, I introduced the C# programming language and explained how it works in the context of the Mono environment, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. I will now go on to some details on the data types supported by the C# programming language." Read the second article at LinuxGazette. Another development article ("Writing Portable Code") is here.
J. Todd Slack emailed in and asked us to inform everyone that their donations towards the FreePepper project will be returned to all who contributed. The contributions from the community were a bit above $500 USD and that was obviously not enought as $11,000 were needed to open source Pepper. "I have come up with the funds privately to buy Pepper and I will be returning everyone's donations in the next few days. I thank everyone who donated" Mr Slack said. Pepper will stay commercial and it will not be open sourced.
Software vendor Red Hat will align its workstation and server OSes to encourage the development of more applications. Another article, says that immediately after its release and apart from the usual rough edges of every .0 version, Red Hat 8.0 generated a lot of heat. Much of it came from the Bluecurve desktop and from the changes RH made to standard KDE.
A survey recently released by IDC finds that large networks of Windows servers are cheaper to run and maintain than Linux servers, even taking into account the higher software licensing costs for Windows. The catch? That survey was commissioned by Microsoft. A Reuters article about the study covers mostly how this study indicates a shift in Microsoft's marketing strategy toward Linux -- moving away from criticizing open source toward focusing on Windows' benefits.
A ZDNet article details the upcoming arguments in the antitrust suit brought by Sun Microsystems against Microsoft over Microsoft's treatment of the Java platform. Sun claims that Microsoft has distributed a crippled and incompatible version of Java in its (monopoly) operating system, which serves to undermine the Java platform. The article covers mostly background and history. It's pretty clear what Sun's case is, but less obvious how Microsoft will choose to defend itself.
A Yahoo Mac Central article notes that, due to the new Apple OS' support for familiar tools and services, IT managers that formerly turned up their noses at the Macs in their organizations are now embracing them. This is particularly true in organizations with a lot of Unix workstations, of course, though the efforts that Apple has made to integrate the Unix tools that make interoperability with Windows easier have benefitted OS X in Windows-heavy offices too.
Terra Soft Solutions, Inc. will announce tomorrow world's first consumer priced ATX form-factor PowerPC motherboard with full Linux support. Terra Soft, also creators of Yellow Dog Linux, will be selling both the PPC motherboard and a fully equipped computer that will be capable of running YDL 2.3. This will give a new face to the consumer Linux landscape, as Linux effectivelly gets its own platform rather than getting installed side by side with other OSes. Check inside for two pages with pictures of the hardware, information and an interview with TerraSoft's co-founder, Kai Staats.
Recently, a few independent departments (Solaris, java, Netscape and other middleware) at Sun Microsystems got integrated into one, the Platform/Software Group. We had a quick chat with Mr John Fowler, Sun Software's CTO about Solaris 10, Java, the competition and more.
I heard so much about this product (some good, some bad), but I had never really tried it before Lindows.com sent us in the latest version of their OS, LindowsOS version 3.0. I took it a spin for two weeks now, and here is what I think about it (and for the eye-candy seekers, screenshots included).
Windows .NET Server 2003 Release Candidate 2 is released to beta testers. Upgrade or join the Customer Preview Program today and see what's new. Update: An anonymous sent us a link on Microsoft's site which describes at a high level how they migrated the entire site to .NET Server RC1. According to the article they are experiencing high levels of uptime and significant performance increase that they may even reduce the size of their cluster.
Learn the fundamentals of session beans: their characteristics and types; how instance pooling, activation, and passivation are applicable to session beans; and examine session bean methods and their life cycle diagrams. Also, Jamie Jaworski covers the fundamentals of the Java language. Learn how to create packages, import classes and interfaces from other packages, and create a program's main() method; how to access command-line variables and form identifiers; and discuss each primitive type, its range of values, and how to create literal values of each type (free reg. req).
