Tuximus.org Interviews KDE’s Dirk Mueller
The German Linux web site Tuximus is interviewing the KDE 3 co-ordinator, Dirk Mueller. Dirk talks about how KDE compares to the Windows desktop and Gnome, about KDE 3 and more.
Wil Wheaton Interviewed at Slashdot
The well known to 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' fans, Wil Wheaton (the 'Wesley Crusher' actor) is being interviewed by Slashdot. Wil talks about TNG, his relationship with computers and the Free Software, his work at NewTek (makers of the 'Lightwave' 3D application) and the legendary "Shut up Wesley!". Great to see an actor turned to a computer geek rather a geek (or singer/model/housewife/fisherman) turned into an actor!
Interview with WINE’s Alexandre Julliard
WINE is definetely not an emulator. Neither a runtime. Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix featuring a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes (some screenshots here). Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% open source Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. WINE's project leader and CodeWeavers' software engineer (a company which sells a modified WINE version), Alexandre Julliard, answers a series of questions to OSNews regarding the project and its future.
GNU-Darwin Goes Beta
One step install. OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command (as root). Darwin-only users will have to take a few extra steps to fetch wget or curl to their computers. The beta sources are the first addition to the new BSD-style source tree. The team hopes to eventually mirror the Apple's Darwin source code there, but in BSD src tree format. In other news, they also have a new Fortran distribution for Darwin and OSX.1 users."
New Releases for Clicker and Plural
Plural OS is a multitasking, microkernel operating system being developed based on the XOpen Single Unix Specifications. The project only started a month ago. Another hobby OS, Clicker, a multitasking open-source operating system project, is based on a modular microkernel and a brand-new architecture. With its new release today, Clicker made a leap, the OS was able to run its first binary application.
ExtremeTech’s WindowsXP Special
With the release of WindowsXP, the well-known technical web site have published three articles: "Price, Performance, Pitfalls": Which edition? How fast? How compatible? Answers from the Labs. "The First Few Weeks": Much to like, but room for improvement. "It's Finally Here": A collection of news, reviews and XPlanations from around Ziff Davis. We should also not forget the very interesting --technically-- article they featured some months ago, regarding kernel enhancements to be found in WindowsXP's kernel.
Extended Attributes and ACLs for Linux’s ext2/3
Access Control Lists (ACL) is a way to support fine-grained per-user or per-group permissions for files and directories. POSIX-like Access Control Lists are now part of many commercial UNIX systems but with these patches available, the same level of flexibility is available for Linux. Extended Attributes are arbitrary name/value pairs that are associated with files or directories. They can be used to store system objects (e.g. capabilities of executables, Access Control Lists) and user objects (e.g. the character set or mime type of a file). The patches support specific kernel versions and only the ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Filesystems like SGI's XFS under Linux support extended attributes (meta-data) natively. Other operating systems that have similar meta-data support built-in to their filesystems are Windows2K/XP, BeOS and AtheOS.
Linux.com: Mandrake 8.1 Review
The calling card for the Linux-Mandrake distribution has always been ease of installation and use, and 8.1 delivers the goods in this department. First time users will find many of the pains of installation are handled automatically by the installation program. Experienced Linux users will appreciate a multitude of installation modes and options. Read the rest of the review at Linux.com.
PC Magazine: “Choosing Linux”
PC Magazine offers a six-way shootout between Red Hat, SuSE, Debian (Potato), Caldera, Mandrake, and Turbo Linux. Red Hat takes top honors in the final reckoning (which can be viewed by downloading a PDF on the last page of the report.) From the article: "Widespread industry acceptance and ease of use make Red Hat's distro a solid choice for general use, but don't rule out other distributions until you've studied them and know which excel at specific tasks."
New Release of (Unstable) GTK+ Libraries
A new release of the development versions of GTK+ and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, Atk) is available at GTK's FTP site. In this unstable version of 1.3.10 (which it will become GTK+ 2.0) you can find GtkTextView fixes, drag-n-drop fixes to generic code and widgets and many Win32 fixes and improvements. More details at Linux Programming web site.
Linux Kernel Hacker Interview: Keith Owens
Kerneltrap interview's Keith Owens this week, an experienced kernel hacker who has long contributed to the Linux kernel. His contributions include updating ksymoops and modutils, both of which he maintains. He also works on kbuild 2.5. Earlier, he built the original Integrated Kernel Debugging patch. He's also working on kdb and XFS.
Day1 XP Accessory: 20MB of Security and Glitch-fix Updates
It's only been out for a day, but Windows XP already needs 20MB of updates, according to C|Net-News. Some of the updates fix security holes, others resolve glitches and a few add new features. This upgrade also purports to sort out problems with Pagemaker, Dreamweaver, McAfee VirusScan, Money 2000 and RealPlayer 7.0 among many others.
New NXzilla Release from Tuxia Labs
What’s Holding Linux Back?
"With all of this going for it, how come Linux has not exploded even more than it has? How come it has not penetrated corporations to a larger degree? How come users have been so resistant to it on the desktop / client level? There are any number of possible reasons, and to be honest, I'm not expert enough to be able to nail them all down with absolute certainty. But I, like so many of you, am a huge supporter of the platform and a rabid enthusiast who spends countless hours tweaking and tinkering with various distributions. It is a synergy of sorts. I learn about the complexities while working to customize the system, and as an old DOS guy from way back, it is actually pretty fun." AnandTech's Paul Sullivan is analyzing the Linux situation in his latest editorial.
Interview with Guillaume Maillard of the BlueOS Team
A few days ago we hosted an interview with the OpenBeOS team leader but I received a number of emails asking us for more information regarding the other effort to 'save' BeOS, BlueOS. BlueOS uses Linux kernel 2.4.12 as its basis, and Xfree. For now, they are building a BeOS look-alike Interface Kit and the app_server on top of XFree, so it is not just a simple window manager, but a whole new API and environment. In future versions, the BlueOS team will completely bypass XFree and have a stand alone BeOS compatible app_server which will only use some of the XFree's system calls to be able to use its 2D/3D drivers. But let's read what the French coder Guillaume Mailard has to say about the project. Guillaume also sent us a screenshot which shows the custom BeOS-alike GUI the team have already coded the last few months, currently running under BeOS (and this is why they have shared that code with the OpenBeOS team) and it is currently ported to Linux.
Steve Ballmer: Windows is Finally Stable
Microsoft's next-generation OS is finally here. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is walking the streets of London calling Windows XP the 'no compromise' operating system--both reliable, and compatible while Bill Gates officially launches the product, and what could be the company's most important product in more than six years.
AMD’s Hammer Architecture – Making Sense of it All
"Judging a book by its cover alone would mean that AMD's Hammer architecture would be used in the first 64-bit x86 microprocessors. We already know that Intel has taken a route away from x86 for their 64-bit solution, Itanium which uses a new instruction set architecture (ISA) called EPIC. The point of this article is to not only examine the pros and cons of AMD's extension of the 32-bit x86 ISA but also the rest of the story when it comes to Hammer since there is a lot more to this architecture than a few more registers and greater memory addressability." Anandtech explains it all for you.
Gates Confirms Windows Longhorn and Blackcomb
"Down at the bottom of Bill Gates' keynote to the Professional Developers Conference yesterday lies confirmation that the wheels have come off the Windows rollout wagon." TheRegister reports. Windows Longhorn is scheduled for release in 2003, while Blackcomb, which will be the real .NET OS, is scheduled for sometime due to 2005. WindowsXP is not far away though, as the official retail release is due tomorrow.
Loki’s Draeker: Why Run Windows Games on Linux?
"Competitor Scott Draeker isn't impressed with TransGaming Technologies' plan to use its version of Wine to get Windows games to work on Linux. Not so fast, says Draeker, whose Loki Entertainment has been the flagship company of that "traditional" approach. Draeker has doubts about games running on Wine working as well as games actually made to run on Linux. Although Loki filed for bankruptcy back in August, the company has continued to release games, including Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns in late August and Postal Plus 'coming soon.'" Read the rest of the article on NewsForge.
Mesa 4.0 and Crystal Space 0.90 Released
Great day today for the open source gaming. Mesa 4 was just released with new features such as the implementation of OpenGL 1.3 standard. In the meantime, Crystal Space 0.90 was released for a large number of platforms. Crystal Space is an open source 3D engine with advanced capabilities.