With more than 50 percent share of the Linux server OS market, Red Hat is on a roll. In an exclusive video interview, CEO Matthew Szulik talks about Microsoft, Sun and survival. View the video at ZDNews.
At USENIX 2002, the NetBSD project held an introduction of the NetBSD operating system. You can read in the slides presented about its structure, its release schedule (version 1.6 comes out in 1-2 months), its goals, its future and a lot more.
"Isn't it about time the Macintosh was simply discontinued—put down like an old dog? Why, exactly, does Apple maintain this line of machines instead of starting fresh or at least introducing something new with fresh legs. The Mac has become the AS/400 of desktop computing, except for the fact that it's prettier. Of course, if Apple never moves forward, what happens to the copycat Windows platform?"Another one of Dvorak's well-known editorials.
"IE has grown staid in recent years as the competition has vanished. But it's still the best browser, barely. If Mozilla can improve its reliability and site compatibility, I would have no problem recommending that product over IE to any user. Sadly, I can't honestly recommend Opera to anyone. It's not free, unless you settle for an ad-injected version, and it's most notable features--an MDI option and its configurable UI--are already available in Mozilla, which is completely free."Read the review at WinSuperSite.
Our friends over at PCLinuxOnline are hosting an interview with the Lindows CEO, Michael Robertson. Nothing really new is revealed by Robertson, but an interesting read nonetheless.
XFce is an easy-to-use environment for X11 based on GTK+. There is an initial version of xfwm4, a brand-new implementation of the window manager for XFce. It is a very lightweight, fast, and fully-themeable window manager compliant with freedesktop.org standards (i.e., fully compatible with KDE 2/3 and GNOME 2). It is based on GTK+ 2.0 and uses pango for font rendering (eg. antialiased text & Unicode). Oliver Fourdan sent us two new screenshots of XFce4 (1, 2), running next to KDE3/Gnome2.
"Attorneys for the states seeking tough penalties for Microsoft Corp.'s antitrust actions have backed off of a demand for a modular version of the Windows operating system, saying information sharing is more important than dismantling the Redmond, Wash., software maker's flagship product."Read it at eWeek.
"Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to resort to significantly larger chips or even adding a second processor to the system."The story is at TheRegUS. Alan Cox says that the technology can bring up to 30% more performance than the same CPU running without Hyper-Threading, but special conditions have to be met, for example, the applications need to be programmed as multi-threaded. The right hardware for the right software.
"Sun Microsystems will announce on Wednesday a free software initiative aimed at undercutting Microsoft and other rivals in the battle over Web services software.
Sun plans to give away a basic version of its application server software, a key piece of infrastructure software for building business applications. Application server software is technology that runs e-business and other Web site transactions. The giveaway targets computers that run Microsoft's Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems, Sun said."The story is at ZDNews. Our Take: Why does that reminds me Microsoft and their giveaway of IE back in the day, in order to win over Netscape? Microsoft ended up in the courts for it...
Slackware 8.1 has been released and is available for download. An installation ISO image can be found here.You can pre-order the Slackware 8.1 official 4 CD-ROM set at Slackware's store. Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the Mozilla 1.0 browser, kernel 2.4.18, support for filesystems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers. Mirrors available.
The Lycoris folks released the last beta (named "Build 45") before the final release of Lycoris Update2 next month. The first ISO is 500 MB, while the third one, which contains the dev. tools, is 160 MB.
"So far, Linux has run just fine, hasn't crashed, and seems to offer tremendous flexibility, but this comes at the price of complexity. Up to a point, Linux is as easy to use as any other mainstream operating system. But after that point is passed, the water gets very deep, very quickly--as my monitor resolution issue serves to illustrate. Windows also suffers from this "easy up to a point" issue, but the point is a good bit farther down the road than it is in Linux." The second part of David Coursey's trip to the Linux world.
Dave Hansen, the IBM programmer working at the Linux kernel, answers back to some interesting questions about Linux, development and its desktop status, at an interview over at Slashdot.
"In an about-face, Microsoft said Tuesday that it will reinstate the ability to run Java programs in Windows XP. Microsoft said it would include its own Java software in the Service Pack 1 update to Windows XP due late this summer. In the long term, though, the company plans to remove Java from Windows altogether."Read the report at News.com.
A short while after the report of the appearance of Microtel PCs with LindowsOS pre-installed at Walmart.com, both Walmart.com and Lindows were claiming that LindowsOS "delivers the stability of UNIX with the ease of Windows and the ability to run most Microsoft programs." Today, that last phrase has gone missing and there is no more talk of running any programs designed for Windows, let alone Microsoft products. Our Take: Oh, they realised that WINE can't run all Windows apps because not all the Win32 APIs are public? Why did it take them more than one year to realise this?
"With more and more hosts being connected to the Internet, the importance of securing connected networks has increased, too. One mechanism to provide enhanced security for a network is to filter out potentially malicious network packets. Firewalls are designed to provide ``policy-based'' network filtering."Read the paper at Benzedrine.
"Microsoft on Moday released an updated version of its Internet Explorer Web browser software for the Macintosh. Version 5.2 of IE for the Mac is available for free from Microsoft's Mactopia Web site. New features include better handling of fonts through OS X 10.1.5's Quartz graphics engine."Read the report at ZDNews. Our Take:The (since forever) text input/form bugs, are still not fixed though...
"Industry sources close to Microsoft's plans say that certain OEMs will be proved with service pack one as early as the end of this month. System integrators have wanted Microsoft to introduce the service pack for some time. At a system builder conference in Monaco earlier this year, Microsoft was suggesting that it could arrive in September."Read the report at TheInquirer.
"Two Singapore programmers claim to have created an operating system that can run programs written for different platforms such as Windows and Linux. Called MXI (Motion Experience Interface), the new operating system will allow handhelds to run any desktop program, said R. Chandrasekar and Sam Hon Kong Lum, the 22-year-old co-inventors."Read the report at ZDNews.
U.S. software giant Microsof Monday took a swipe at rival mobile operating systems maker Symbian, saying familiarity with Windows will help it be the standard used in new high-performance wireless devices. "It's important (for developers and users) to have access to data they are already familiar with in the PC environment," Derek Brown, director of mobile devices group, told Reuters in an interview. Read the article at Reuters.
