Lindows: Victim of the Old, “New Economy” Way of Doing Business?

Linspire 22 Comments
"My point is that Lindows as been the target of a lot of criticism over the past year, include a fair amount from NewsForge and Linux.com. And most of that criticism comes from Robertson promising fantastic new breakthroughs and then not delivering. Lindows has been a victim of its own hype. So why do I feel sorry for the company? Because Robertson has been following an extremely effective practice, especially in the tech business last five years or so: over-hype, under-deliver." Read the editorial.
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GNU C library 2.3 Released

General Development 17 Comments
Glibc 2.3 is out and prelinking support was added for ELF targets, startup times are significantly reduced (C++ and Qt/KDE applications will be most benefited from this - with this support on glibc there is no reason to revert to manual prelinking KDE which reportedly created stability issues). Read-only stdio streams now use mmap to speed up operation. The malloc functions were completely rewritten. The runtime now can handle the ELF thread-local storage (TLS) ABI on some platforms. This release has been ported to PowerPC64/Linux. Download it in a bz2 (13 MB) or gunzip (17.5 MB) tarball formats.
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The Linux Distribution that’s Always in the Black

Slackware, Slax 25 Comments
Many of today's new Linux users wouldn't have a clue as to who Patrick Volkerding is. For the brigade whose main arguments are over the merits of this GUI and that, the word Slackware wouldn't ring a bell either. But for many others who jumped on the Linux bandwagon when it was exclusively for geeks, Volkerding is a hero. In early 1993, he started the distribution called Slackware which was basically an attempt to address many of the problems people faced with SoftLanding System Linux, the first and only commercial Linux at the time. Read the interview at TheAge.
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Review: Lindows 2.0 Dissected

  Submitted by dave_sn Linspire 14 Comments
Despite his earlier doubts about Lindows, Jim Lynch waxes rhapsodic in a review of Version 2.0: "... We finally had a chance to sit down with it and surprise, surprise; here at ExtremeTech we were impressed," Jim Lynch writes. "Lindows is a very slick, highly useable OS. In fact, I liked it so much I'm actually writing this review in it - using Abiword on Lindows OS." Also, the retail giant Wal-Mart and its partners hit a new price point while introducing customers to Lindows with a new sup-$200 PC.
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Jordan Hubbard Talks About Apple and Motorola

Apple 34 Comments
Jordan Hubbard, formerly head of FreeBSD development, and now of Apple MacOS X/Darwin fame, talks frankly about UNIX, Apple's MacOS X, BSD, and the business of competing in the consumer computer world in this MacCentral article. In it, we see some of his impressions on the present and future of MacOS X, opinions on Motorola's CPU's in Apple products, and what it takes to get ISV support.
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Graphical User Interfaces: It’s Time for an Overhaul

Graphics 51 Comments
"Apple released Mac OS X last year. Having used computers for almost twenty years, I can say that this new operating system is undoubtedly the best ever. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disappointment. There is something wrong with this OS. It’s not the MACH microkernel, the UNIX core or the fluid motions of the new GUI. Well, actually it is the GUI. It’s not a bad interface, it’s probably the best yet, but isn’t it about time we stopped pointing and clicking?" Read the editorial at MetaMute.
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Sun to Ship non-SMP x86 Solaris 9 for $99 USD

Solaris 24 Comments
Sun on Friday will announce plans to release an unbundled version of the Solaris 9 operating environment for non-Sun x86 hardware for $99 for a single CPU system. After months of indecision, Sun will now ship Solaris 9 x86, unbundled, supporting both the Sun hardware platform, for both current and future products, as well as the same list of all hardware supported for Solaris 8, according to Sun officials in Palo Alto, Calif. Early access to the Solaris 9 bits will come in the next four to eight weeks, and the final product will ship in the January time-frame, they said.
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Red Hat 8 For Joe & Jane User?

Red Hat 81 Comments
Well, here on OSNews, there has been plenty of discussion about Red Hat 8, what it is, what it isn't, the Bluecurve look and many other features and issues. I ordered Red Hat 8 Personal Edition and decided to see how close Red Hat 8 may be to a distribution that Joe and Jane User could install and use.
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Why Microsoft Needs .NET

.NET 25 Comments
" I think you can see where I'm going with this - by moving software to .NET, Microsoft frees themselves from the x86 pit. They need to compile the .NET framework for each platform they want to support, and they need to write the final compiler stage that converts the IL to machine code, and bingo your code runs on the new platform!" Read the article at Kuro5hin.
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Interview With Adam de Boor, ex-CTO of GeoWorks

Original OSNews Interviews 27 Comments
It is always an honour to interview people who have 'served' and worked on operating systems at the "golden" times of the operating systems, the '80s and pre-Win9x days. Today we interview Adam de Boor, who was the CTO at GeoWorks, developers of the GEOS, in the begining of the last decade. Adam today works for OpenWave Systems. We discuss about GeoWorks, its past, its future, where it should have been.
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Red Hat Hits More Sensitive Nerves

  Submitted by kevinwatt Red Hat 93 Comments
Like the PR headaches with KDE were not enough for Red Hat, now it seems that Taiwanese people are unhappy because their flag was left out of the KDE control panel, while it was there by default. Also, "in a surprising move they've completely broken with their previous policy of 100% open source. The new distribution contains a few components which are (C) Red Hat and are *not* freely re-distributable", the Linux Emporium claims. Discussion about the issue here and here.
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Libranet GNU/Linux 2.7, Debian with a Kick

  Submitted by John Gowin Debian 15 Comments
Linux Orbit has reviewed Libranet GNU/Linux 2.7: "Other Linux distribution companies have tried to create commercial Linux products based on Debian GNU/Linux, but few have achieved long term success. Progeny Linux comes to mind as a commercial Linux distribution company whose Linux product met with good reviews, but couldn't remain in business. Libranet is a rare exception to this rule. Libranet GNU/Linux has been around quite a while and continues to build a devoted Linux user base on a commercial product based on Debian GNU/Linux. With their most recent release of Libranet GNU/Linux 2.7, Libranet continues to improve on an already solid Linux distribution."
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Jaguar Does Windows–and Then Some

macOS 31 Comments
"I sat down at my Macintosh at home to do some photo editing when I realized the pictures I wanted were on a Windows computer. Although the two machines are just a few feet from each other, moving the files from one to the other would, until recently, have required me to copy the pictures to some sort of removable storage unit, probably a recordable CD. Then plunk that into the Mac." Read the article at BusinessWeek.
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Mungi 1.2 released

  Submitted by Andrew Baumann OS News 11 Comments
Mungi is a 64-bit, single-address-space, capability-based operating system designed to easily support distribution and persistence. The initial public release is now available as GPLed source, and runs on the L4/MIPS (R4x00 CPU) and L4/Alpha (21164 & 21264 CPU) microkernels. This release features a mostly complete kernel, user-level libraries for POSIX support, and some initial application code. It lacks device drivers, persistence, mandatory access control, and a raft of other features currently under development.
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