SGI Turnaround Getting Closer, Company Promises

SGI and IRIX 7 Comments
"The quarter's revenue total includes $62.5 million made selling "non-core intellectual property rights" to Microsoft But it's worrying when a company has to look at what else it can sell off to help up make what it has lost in the sales of its core products. Take away the Microsoft-sourced revenue, and SGI's quarterly sales figure falls to $316.5 million - 27 per cent lower than the previous quarter" TheRegister reports on SGI's status. Our Take: Sell out may be one of the reasons why the interview we sent to the IRIX kernel team 2 months ago was never returned answered. The engineers were willing and responded immediately, but that was not the case for their marketing and PR departments which we had to go through and get their "ok".
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Linux Library Loader Stirs Borland Complaint

Linux 1 Comment
"It certainly would not be a surprise for friction to occur when Windows and Linux developers are confined in close quarters. Now a recent post on a Borland community message board by Danny Thorpe, a well-known Borland engineer who has been involved with the Kylix project from the beginning, has stirred the pot. Thorpe, rightly or wrongly, criticized both Linux and open source in explaining why Kylix wasn't working exactly as intended at library load time." LinuxWorld features the full article. Our Take: The timing for Mr. Thorpe to publish such an article was probably a bit wrong from a marketing point of view: Kylix 2 was announced just today and such an open technical disagreement can have some negative impact at its sales in the Linux market.
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Interview: Michael Phipps on OpenBeOS

Original OSNews Interviews 31 Comments
After Palm announced the buyout of Be, Inc.'s intellectual property & Technology and after some consequent indications from several key people that Palm has no interest at Be's products and especially in BeOS, a number of the BeOS believers tried to find a new home. Some found confort in AtheOS, others joined BeUnited's effort to license the BeOS source code, while some developers formed efforts like OpenBeOS and BlueOS. OpenBeOS (OBOS for its friends) consists from a number of BeOS developers who are trying to recreate the BeOS Kits in a form of a new, complete and open source Operating System that has source and if possible binary compatibility with BeOS 5. One of the most important people in this effort, Michael Phipps, also part of the kernel team, is here today for an interview to OSNews.
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Interview: Carl Sassenrath on REBOL

Original OSNews Interviews 58 Comments
REBOL is a powerful software technology (ever thought that you could write a full blown GUI Instant Messenger in only 7 kb of source code?) designed from the ground up to enable a new era of distributed Internet applications. The technology provides a ubiquitous, lightweight model of distributed computing that operates across all types of computer systems. REBOL is a true distributed computing architecture. Applications and data become distributed across all devices. REBOL is completely device independent, so it does not matter what operating system or hardware is being used. Every system of the Internet becomes an independent resource that can process and communicate information. The REBOL kernel currently runs on more than 40 different operating systems -- everything from large Sun Solaris servers, to Windows and Macintosh PCs, to Linux, BeOS, down to CE handheld devices. And it is here to revolutionize the Internet, by introducing the X Internet (also called as 'XNet') through the REBOL Internet Operating System (IOS). Read more of what Carl Sassenrath, Rebol Tech's CTO and founder, has to say about the future, Rebol and the race against Microsoft's .NET Services.
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Mandrake Linux 8.1 Now Available in Retail Stores

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 2 Comments
MandrakeSoft, announces the availability of boxed sets of Mandrake Linux Version 8.1 in retail outlets throughout the world and on MandrakeStore. There are four versions of the 8.1 product, each designed to suit user needs: Mandrake Linux Standard Edition 8.1, Mandrake Linux PowerPack Edition 8.1, Mandrake Linux ProSuite Edition 8.1, and Mandrake Linux ProSuite old. Also, with the help of TransGaming Technologies, developers of software portability solutions that seamlessly allow cutting edge games to operate on the Linux platform, MandrakeSoft announced the release of the Mandrake Linux Gaming Edition. Designed specifically for gamers, this release bundles Mandrake Linux 8.1 Standard Edition, with Electronic Arts' The Sims, the popular virtual simulation game that allows players to create a neighborhood of simulated people known as "Sims" and control their lives.
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Apple Looks to Future – Post-Motorola/PowerPC world?

Apple 14 Comments
"Apple is becoming increasingly irritated with its prime PowerPC provider, Motorola, to the extent that it talking to fellow PowerPC partner, IBM, about how the platform can continue to evolve without the chips-to-cellphones giant's participation, sources close to the Mac maker have claimed." TheRegister analyzes the situation and proposes alternatives for Apple. In the meantime, more information about Motorola's new G5 CPU are coming to light. Our Take: The article proposes that Apple should look into Itanium and Sun SPARC CPUs to port MacOSX into, but I think the author has left out a more realistic candidate, if indeed Apple is getting a divorce from Motorola: the AMD Hammer. Except Linux and some rumours that a new version of WindowsXP may run in this new AMD 64-bit CPU, I believe that MacOSX could enrich and also gain from this new platform.
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Tru64 still at Compaq’s Product List

Unix 2 Comments
After the merger of HP and Compaq, they were many these who claimed that the 64-bit Unix Tru64 will cease to exist in favor of HP's HP-UX. But the official claim is that Tru64 will continue to exist: "Our major focus today for our Tru64 UNIX customers and partners remains unchanged -- to deliver on the Alpha-based Tru64 UNIX plan-of-record which includes full support on the upcoming Alpha EV7 and EV79 systems as well as further operating system enhancements for our Alpha-based customers." More news about Tru64 can be found at Tru64.org
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Borland to Revamp Developer Package

General Development No Comments
Borland, will announce version 2 of its Kylix package Tuesday. Kylix, introduced in January, lets software developers write programs that can be used on Linux or Windows machines. The new version will add features that improve the product's support for Web services, a representative said. Web services move tasks that took place on a PC or a single server onto a network of servers, ZDNews reports. In other development news, Python 2.2b1 was released.
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Kernel Hacker Interview: Russell King

  Submitted by Jeremy Andrews Linux No Comments
Kerneltrap has posted the latest in-depth kernel hacker interview with Russell King, who originally ported Linux to ARM and continues to oversee ARM Linux development: "I started hacking on Linux for my Acorn A5000 machine back in Spring 1994 while still at Southampton University, after a fellow student, Martin Ebourne, introduced it to me. An A5000 is a desktop-like ARM based machine. It was already about 3 years old and underpowered at that time, with only 4MB of RAM but it was the machine I had." Russell talks about ARM, the 2.4 kernel, the upcoming 2.5 kernel and much more.
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Terra Soft Releases Yellow Dog Linux 2.1

  Submitted by David Huff Linux No Comments
Terra Soft Solutions, the developer of Linux solutions for PowerPC microprocessors, announced the immediate availability of Yellow Dog Linux version 2.1. YDL 2.1 offers the following updates and improvements: YDL installer now supports individual package selection, KDE 2.2.1, XFree86 4.1.0, 2.4.10 (default) and 2.2.19, Mac-on-Linux 0.9.60 which automatically grabs the ROM image from your Mac OS partition--reducing setup to a minimum. - Webmin web-based system administration tool, Mozilla 0.9.4, Ext3 journaling file system, Sound support on iBook 1 and iBook 2 (2001), Sleep support on full range of Apple portables (include all iBooks), Improved support for Apple Network Servers and support for NVidia GeForce 2 & ATI Radeon video cards.
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Apple’s “Breakthrough Device”, Not So Revolutionary?

Apple 37 Comments
From Wired News: Apple on Tuesday will unveil a new portable electronic device that allows people to listen to digital music files away from the computer, according to sources familiar with the company. The device -- called the iPod -- can be synched with the computer using a high-speed cable connection that allows consumers to download their music into a portable system, which can then be accessed by either a car or home stereo system. Last Wednesday, Simple Devices released a wireless platform that allows users to stream MP3 files from a personal computer to home or car stereo systems. Motorola will roll out a wireless receiver for home stereos that runs on the new Simple Devices platform.
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RMS Requests GNOME Summary Cease Mention of Non-Free Software

Open Source 19 Comments
"...Some weeks ago we got a mail from Richard Stallman asking that we stop all mentions of non-free software in the GNOME summaries. The background for the request was that we had mentioned the beta of Star Office some time back. I argued that the purpose of the GNOME summaries was to promote GNOME and while our focus of course is free software I felt that it was natural to mention the availability of non-free software where the existence of such software where a clear advantage for GNOME. RMS replied telling us that he disagreed with my argument and saying that we are legitimatizing the use of non-free software by mentioning it..." This is part of the email that Christian Schaller sent to the Gnome Foundation mailing list asking the Gnome users for their opinion on how to proceed on the matter. So far, the replies are taking Christian's side and some mentioned that Richard Stallman's opinions are, simply put, extreme in this case.
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Mandrake Put an End to Plex86?

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris No Comments
Latest news on Mandrake Software are their release candidate Linux version for Itanium, and that their developers are now preparing Object Prelinked versions of KDE for the next Mandrake, dubbed Cooker. But there are also news about lay offs which took place recently over at MandrakeSoft, in which Kevin Lawton, the person behind Plex86 and also the original author of the x86 emulator Bochs, was layed off. Kevin doesn't know what will happen to the ambitious Plex86 project now he parted with the company that previously backed the whole project. Our Take: First of all, good luck to Kevin. We are sure he will find soon another job, as he is an extremely skilled developer. Plex86 is open source, so it may live up, but there is... a small catch. Developing for Plex86 is _extremely hard_. It requires developers with spiffy low level x86 knowledge, it is not a project about a new email or IM client or a new cool-looking window manager. There are not many developers with such deep knowledge, this is why Kevin worked on it with little help from others for so long. When I was part of the original BeUnited's admin team, we had Plex86 as one of our projects to be ported to BeOS. During the period of 1 year, the project changed 3 team leaders (one of them was a proven experienced BeOS developer), each and every one called its quits for the exact same reason: Not enough knowledge to work on such a complex project.
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PowerPC G5 Performance “Stunning”

Hardware 5 Comments
Motorola's PowerPC 8500 - aka the G5 - continues to move steadily toward its scheduled release, TheRegister reports. The G5 is the next major version of the PowerPC architecture and includes a new internal bus structure, a longer, ten-stage instruction pipeline, redesigned integer and floating-point maths units. It will be offered in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and fabbed using silicon-on-insulator technology at 0.13 micron. Check out the SPEC CPU benchmarks which show that the G5 outperforms the current versions of Pentium 4, by a large margin.
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