OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

ELX Power Desktop 1.0 Final Version Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-12 Linux 36 Comments

ELX Power desktop 1.0 is ready to be shipped. The first 100 users will receive an official ELX T-shirt as an early bird offer. Prices for the three versions of ELX are between $70 and $105 USD. Here is a comparison chart between ELX, Windows and the rest of the Linux distributions.

OmniGroup Questions the IE Future for the Mac Platform

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-12 Internet Explorer 36 Comments

Late last week in an online article The OmniGroup president, William Shipley (makers of OmniWeb for MacOSX) opined that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) would eventually stop development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh.

Introducing the Future of Mach: Yamit

Guest post by Igor Shmukler 2002-06-12 BSD & Darwin 61 Comments

Yamit is a microkernel, developed under a BSD compatible license. Mentioned capabilities are a thread-aware kernel and multiprocessor support (including both tight SMP and loose - NUMA architectures). The project is largely based on the Mach microkernel that was being designed for many years by CMU and OSF.

Four New Windows XP Patches

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-11 Windows 19 Comments

Microsoft has released four new patches for Windows XP, some important security ones and other basic support items: NET Framework ASP.NET Session State Security Hotfix. Windows Management Instrumentation Cannot Register Permanent Event Consumer with Dynamic Classes: Windows XP Patch. WMI AccessCheck Receives Local Administrator's SID Platform SDK Redistributable COM+ Java Runtime Support. Get their download links at ActiveWin.

Slackware 8.1 RC3 is Released for Testing

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-11 Slackware, Slax 7 Comments

The third release candidate for Slackware 8.1 has been released. Changelog here.

OpenBFS Development Completed

Submitted by BGA 2002-06-11 Haiku 77 Comments

Axel, Bruno and the rest of the company in the OpenBFS team, have completed the development of OpenBFS, the open source equivelant of Be's popular 64-bit journaling file system. OpenBFS currently runs on BeOS 5, awaiting the further evolution of the OpenBeOS/NewOS kernel in order to start a back port. The team reports that while the filesystem clone is not very well tested yet, it is already seems pretty stable and it beats in performance the original BFS.

Sun Feels Heat Over x86 Solaris

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-10 Solaris 38 Comments

"Disgruntled Solaris users are pushing Sun Microsystems Inc. to decide on the fate of the operating environment on Intel Corp. processors. Sun officials in Palo Alto, Calif., have been going back and forth with the Solaris Intel user base since January, when the company said Version 9 for the x86 architecture was being "deferred" in favor of projects that were more profitable. Now the process seems stuck, and users are getting restless, according to sources familiar with the negotiations between the user community and Anil Gadre, Sun's vice president of Solaris software." Read the report at ExtremeTech.

Gentoo Linux 1.2 Final Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-10 Gentoo 25 Comments

Gentoo Linux 1.2 has been released; basic changes include install-related fixes and countless updates to the Portage tree, such as KDE 3.0.1 (CVS 2002-06-04) and GNOME 2 (beta, CVS 2002-06-07) support. Note that GNOME 2 is still masked, but fully useable. New users can find install instructions here and ISOs and build tarballs. Existing users need only to "emerge sync" to be up-to-date.

HP Announces HP-UX 11i for Itanium 2

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-10 Unix 12 Comments

"Hewlett Packard Co will today take the wraps off of the second release of its HP-UX operating system for workstations and servers employing 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel Corp. HP-UX 11i version 1.6, which will start shipping in the second or third week of July." Read the report at TheRegister.

Outdated Windows Code Poses a Threat

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-10 Windows 19 Comments

"Microsoft will more quickly retire old code in its Windows operating system and other software as a result of the company's four-month-old "trustworthy computing" initiative, the company's lead bug basher said in an interview." Read the rest of the article at ZDNews.

Palm Launching Palm OS 5

Submitted by Yves R. Crevecoeur 2002-06-10 Wireless 20 Comments

"A year ago, investors were losing faith in Palm Inc. The once high-flying company itself admitted to frailty and mistakes. But Palm never gave up, and launches Monday a new operating system -- a crucial weapon in its battle to remain dominant in the competitive handheld market. Palm OS 5, analysts say, is a much-needed major upgrade from the pioneer of personal digital assistants' earlier operating systems." Read the report at Yahoo!. Update: Palm pins hopes on beefed-up OS.

Digital Research and the GEM OS- The Other “Windows”

Guest post by Roger M. 2002-06-09 Editorial 33 Comments

One of the early GUI operating systems for the PC, that is still being developed today, is GEM, an operating system that was originally created by Digital Research in the early 1980s. GEM was described as providing a Mac like GUI for the PC – long before Microsoft Windows 3.1 or 95. Today GEM continues to be developed as FreeGEM and old and new versions of the GEM OS and GEM applications can be downloaded for free (see links below). The history of Digital Research and GEM is quite interesting, as GEM had the potential to become the "Windows" (or Mac) of the PC world.

CYC May One Day Provide Common-sense Computing

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-09 Geek stuff 8 Comments

"Day after day since 1984, teams of programmers, linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers have plugged away at a $60 million project they hope will transform human existence: teaching a computer common sense. They have been feeding a database named Cyc 1.4 million truths and generalities about daily life so it can automatically make assumptions humans make: Creatures that die stay dead. Dogs have spines. Scaling a cliff requires intense physical effort." Read the interesting article over at CNN.

May 2002 Updated Windows Platform SDK

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-09 Windows No Comments

ActiveWin reports that Microsoft has updated the Windows Platform SDK to include documentation, header files, and libraries for new APIs in Windows XP SP1 and Windows .NET Server. This edition of the SDK supports development for the following platforms: Windows .NET Server family and Advanced Server, Limited Edition, Windows XP, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, Windows 2000, Windows NT versions 3.51 and 4.0, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 95/98/98SE, .NET Enterprise Servers.

A Proud Amiga Tradition: “Death By Mismanagement”

Guest post by Emanuel Mair 2002-06-09 Amiga & AROS 50 Comments

The software-only company Amiga Inc. has published a marketing document outlining how it will sell AmigaOS4, which will run on third party POP-based (PowerPC Open Platform) hardware. Now, however, the open hardware seems to become artificially closed.

New FreeBSD IPFW Beta Code Available

Submitted by Dan 2002-06-09 FreeBSD 3 Comments

Luigi Rizzo, has done an extensive rewrite of the FreeBSD IPFW firewall code (userland and kernel) in an attempt to make it faster and more flexible. His announcement is available over at BSDForums.org. IPFW, the software supplied with FreeBSD, is a packet filtering and accounting system which resides in the kernel, and has a user-land control utility, called ipfw(8).

Writing Your Own Toy OS, PART II

Submitted by Wezza 2002-06-08 General Development 16 Comments

"The next thing that any one should know after learning to make a boot sector and before switching to protected mode is, how to use the BIOS interrupts. BIOS interrupts are the low level routines provided by the BIOS to make the work of the Operating System creator easy. This part of the article would deal with BIOS interrupts." This is the second part of the series of articles on how to write your own toy OS.

Pictures from OpenBSD’s Hackathon

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-08 OpenBSD 6 Comments

The OpenBSD project is currently having what is called a "Hackathon", that is, as many coders as possible, get together for a little more than a week and hack, drink beer, hang around etc. This year, it all happens in Theo deRaadt's hometown, in Calgary, Canada. The slogan of this hackathon is: "Shut up and hack!" Check out pictures of the event, and see the (always growing) number of CVS commits here. The event is terminating late next week.

Compiling Mozilla from Source

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-08 Mozilla, Gecko 22 Comments

Linux-sxs.org features an informative article on how to compile Mozilla from source. Especially if you have switched to GCC 3.1, you can build some really optimized binaries for your Mozilla, as GCC 3.1 does better optimization in general, plus it supports special optimizations for Pentium4 or AthlonXP.

New Desktop/LX Control Panel Screenshots Up

Eugenia Loli 2002-06-08 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 77 Comments

More thumbnails and fullsize images of the new Control Panel are up under the Sneak Peek section. Have look at this great addition to Lycoris Desktop/LX before you get the new version coming out on June 17th. Our Take: Lycoris is shaping up as indeed a great desktop system! Only problem I got with these screenshots is that either Freetype or the particular font used is not up to par. The font rendering quality is truly bad, and I have noticed such problems only under Lycoris.