"Breadbox Computer Company LLC has completed and released to company distributors, its new flagship desktop software suite, Breadbox Ensemble. Ensemble offers a full productivity and internet suite, including Web Browser and Email. Other essential programs such as word processing, spreadsheet, flat file database and graphics applications are integrated into this easy-to-use package". Read the rest of the news over at BreadBox.

CoyoteGulch.com has published an interesting article, benchmarking GCC 3.04 and ICC 6 (the article will be updated again after GCC 3.1's release). In the tests, ICC seems to pull ahead in most tests. When it's behind, it's never very far behind. The opposite is not true, and there are benchmarks where ICC is very far ahead, generating code that can be up to 5 times better than gcc's. Especially interesting, the "Stepanov" benchmark, which shows that ICC is capable of understanding the most complex c++ constructs, whereas GCC gets confused by them and ends up generating much slower code. This is bothersome, because it means that developers who want to get the most speed out of their gcc-compiled system need to write their code pretty much in C, whereas those using ICC can use all the productivity-enhancing features of C++ without speed penalty. As for the "WhetStone" benchmark, shows that gcc still has serious issues dealing with x87 floating-point code. It would also be very interesting to run the very same benchmark on a Pentium4, varying the compiler options, in order to see how both compilers can take advantage of the Pentium4's extra features, and especially SSE-2. Update: Another benchmark can be found here.

The open source Bochs, VMware Workstation by VMware, Inc. and VirtualPC from Connectix are applications that virtualize or emulate the x86 hardware, allowing you to run multiple operating systems on top of a "host" operating system that these three applications run upon. This means that you will be able to run Linux or FreeBSD or other supported "guest" OSes under Windows, Linux (or Macintosh), inside a window or fullscreen. But which one delivers the best performance for the money? And what about the free Bochs?

"After seeing the results of these tests, we can only conclude that Apple's fastest G4 workstations are certainly not faster than dual 1.533MHz Athlon MP-equipped systems, at least as far as After Effects is concerned. Not one of the objective tests we conducted using After Effects showed Apple's flagship machine to be superior. In fact, in most of the tests, the Mac was left lagging far behind. And, this was when we were using a PC whose chips are now three steps below the fastest Athlons available (now the fastest Athlon XP is the 2100+ running at 1.73GHz), and far slower than benchmarks have shown the latest Intel Xeon chips to be, now shipping at 2.4 GHz." The benchmark is held at DigitalVideoEditing. Our Take: We would like to see the benchmarks with dual Athlon MPs or dual PIIIs at 1 Ghz, so it would be more fair, Mhz-wise. On the other hand, Mhz doesn't matter. Right Steve? And at the end of the day, this was the fastest G4 available. The Dual AthlonMP 1.5 is not the fastest available anymore in the PC world (dual SMT Xeon 2.4 Ghz at the same price as the dual G4 1 Ghz anyone?). BTW, it seems that the Mac users feel left behind these days.

Microsoft stores system configuration information in binary format in its Windows Registry, but other vendors take different approaches to achieve the same goal. MacOSX uses text files in XML format, while Solaris features a more complex system instead. Linux still uses flat text files for configuration, however Red Hat encourages the development of GConf, a registry-like system and library, that programs can use to store key-value pairs persistently. Read the interesting article at ComputerWorld.

Four screenshots of MacOSX 10.2 (codenamed Jaguar) have been leaked on the web, via SpyMac. In the screens, you can see some new additions to the preference panel, like tools for cameras and another one, dubbed "Screen Effects". In the dock closeup shot, you can see that on the right of each open minimized application a 16x16 icon is displayed, making easy to understand which application is which. Please note that the specific GUI addition was requested around a year ago by a GUI expert in an editorial at his web page! Another interesting addition is the indexing capabilities in the file system and the Finder preferences as shown in the larger screenshot. Update: More screenshots added to the above linked page.

"In the first two articles of this series (see "Real Time and Linux, Part 1" and "Real Time and Linux, Part 2: the Preemptible Kernel"), we examined the fundamental concepts of real time and efforts to make the Linux kernel more responsive. In this article we examine two approaches to real time that involve the introduction of a separate, small, real-time kernel between the hardware and Linux. We also return to benchmarking and compare a desktop/server Linux kernel to modified kernels." The article is hosted at LinuxDevices.com.

Mark Mitchell is one of the people behind CodeSourcery, but he is mostly known for his major contributions on GCC, the Gnu compiler. These days, Mark is the release manager of GCC and he is working hard trying to get GCC 3.1 out of the door. GCC 3.1 is going to be the first truly stable version of the 3.x source branch and many developers are already looking forward for it. Mark talked to OSNews about the new GCC, the future and the competition.

"It all boils down to these two extremes: RMS wants software freedom regardless of user satisfaction, and Miguel de Icaza wants user satisfaction regardless of whether the principles of the GPL are violated. Everyone else in the GNOME project is somewhere in between, spanning the gap." Read the report at NewsForge.

Yesterday we hosted a competition for the great multi-platform programmer's text editor, Pepper. Hekkelman Programmatuur informed us that the lucky winner is Tim Vernum. Congratulations Tim!

The first big news today from the WWDC 2002 is that Apple now officially stops the MacOS 9 development and goes full speed with OSX. Steve Jobs calls the next step "X only. It's time to drop OS 9," he said. "We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only." He cited Microsoft as an example of companies that are going X only. Apple expects to see 5 million MacOSX users by the end of the year. "These are the guys buying the application software," he said. "MacOS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for you . Today we say goodbye to MacOS 9 for all future development," said Jobs. Stay tuned for more news from WWDC. Update: "Quartz Extreme" will probably force most of the Mac users to upgrade. Read on. Update 2: Read on.

When I received the "Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition" book from O'Reilly, I thought that this would be an in-depth guide, a way to hack around the Red Hat Linux operating system. It was a bit of let down for me to see that the book was for beginners. But, reading through it, I realized that the beauty of the book is in teaching new users lessons that are solid and well constructed throughout its 350 pages.

In this first part of a two-part series, Simson Garfinkel and Michael Mahoney explain why Cocoa and Mac OS X aren't nearly as revolutionary as they are evolutionary -- and still in the process of refinement. The story begins with Apple's genesis in the 1970s and takes you through key events up through 1993, when NeXTSTEP began to flounder. In Part Two (Friday, May 10), Simson and Michael pick up the story with the Star Trek project and bring you to the current iteration of Mac OS X. Update: Apple has released a "Kernel Programming" online book, which has a wide and diverse audience like the set of potential system software developers for MacOSX, including the following sorts of developers: device-driver writers, network-extension writers, file-system writers, developers of software that modifies file system data on-the-fly, system programmers familiar with BSD, Linux, and similar OSes, developers who want to learn about kernel programming.

Pepper is a great text editor for programmers whose main principle is to help its user be as productive as possible. A typical example of Pepper's innovations is the invention of the "Accelerator". The Accelerator allows you to enter text or code quickly with a simple keystroke. Hekkelman Programmatuur, the company behind Pepper, will give away for free a copy of Pepper 4 to a lucky OSNews reader. Pepper currently runs on MacOS/X, Windows2k/XP, while a release for Linux and FreeBSD (and possibly IRIX and Solaris) will be ready in the next few months. The winner will receive a "keycode" unlocking the software for all platforms. Read more to see how you can enter the competition. Update: Competition is now closed! Thanks everyone who participated!