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Futuristic OS on ST:Enterprise Powered by G4 Cubes and Director

Geek stuff 11 Comments
IDriveX (Apple employee) was recently lucky enough to visit the set of "Star Trek: Enterprise" whilst filming was in progress. He met the cast, toured the set and found out some closely-guarded secrets - the ship is powered by Macintosh computers and a light switch. Read his report at TrekToday and check some pictures in his web site showing the Apple G4 Cubes powering the monitors in the Enterprise starship (the interactive futuristic UI of Enterprise is written in.. Macromedia Director running under MacOS).
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Two Excerpts from “Modern Operating Systems”

OS News 42 Comments
InformIT.com features two special articles (free registration required), excerpts from the "Modern Operating Systems" book by Dr. Andrew Tanenbaum (who is also the author of Minix - the 'grandfather' of Linux). This book is valued as the Bible of the operating system design and implementation and every serious OS designer/developer has by his/her side. The two free chapters featured, are "A History of Operating Systems" and "Operating System Threads". A must read for everyone and if you are serious into operating systems, you should very well buy the book with no second thought. Our Take: It's that good. Highly recommended by both myself and my husband (who is already largely involved in three operating systems so far).
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OpenMotif 2.2.0 Released

Wayland 14 Comments
Motif is the industry standard ToolKit available on more than 200 hardware and software platforms. It is the de facto graphical user interface on UNIX systems in heterogeneous networked computing environments. Motif is also the base graphical user interface for the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and a number of other desktops. The new version includes the following changes: Ten new widgets have been added to the Open Motif toolkit. These widgets expand Motif's capabilities in areas such as geometry management, resource specification, and user interaction. User-defined "ToolTips" have been added to all widgets that are a subclass of XmPrimitive. Any widget that is a child of a VendorShell gains this functionality.
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Jordan Hubbard Chat at #FreeBSD on OPN

FreeBSD 23 Comments
BSDVault.net has published the transcript of a Q&A chat with Jordan Hubbard, the prominent FreeBSD leader who also works for Apple's kernel team. The chat took place at the #freebsd IRC channel on the OPN server. In the very interesting chat, Jordan talks about MacOSX, BSD, SMPng and X11: "Well, I certainly have been using the X window system for a long time and have written a fair amount of software for it; for what it does, it rocks, but for what it doesn't do, it really sucks too. Don't even talk to me about font handling or printing. So I think that before you're going to see X really get some decent applications, you're going to have to finish the missing 5% of X, the part that was scheduled to take 90% of the time and so nobody got around to it. Plus, the whole UI war thing needs to end. Adobe is never going to port photoshop while nobody can answer "Which GUI environment is dominant and therefore recommended for use?" So I think X will probably remain the DOS of window systems. It is used for a lot longer than anyone predicted, deeply loved by its adherants who know how to do absolutely anything with it, ignored by the mainstream who will have moved on."
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FreeBSD Week: Introduction to FreeBSD

FreeBSD 22 Comments
The BSD family of operating systems date all the way back to the 1980s when AT&T owned the legal rights to the OS known generically as "Unix". During that time, the source code was licensed out to a few communities, each of which developed their own proprietary version. One of the versions was BSD-Unix, named after the University of Berkeley. Due to license agreements with AT&T when Berkley tried to release their BSD-Unix for free, AT&T sued. The outcome of that lawsuit was the creation of BSD/OS, which was basically AT&T/BSD Unix with the proprietary AT&T code removed. Later on the commercial BSD was branched into what is today FreeBSD. FreeBSD currently runs on the Intel and Alpha architectures, with ports to Arm, Itanium, PowerPC and Sparc on the works.
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New Power Macs Break 1GHz Barrier

  Submitted by Olaf van Es Apple 32 Comments
"Apple Computer on Monday broke the 1GHz barrier not once but twice with the delivery of new Power Macs. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company unveiled faster Power Macs that analysts and Mac users say could close the "gigahertz gap" with PCs. Apple shipped three new Power Macs, with the top-of-the-line model packing two 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors. The other new models have single 800MHz or 933MHz processors. The company also shipped Nvidia's GeForce 4 MX graphics processor, about a week before the card's scheduled announcement." Read the rest of the report & analysis at ZDNews.
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Red Hat’s New Linux Packs a Bigger Punch

Red Hat 2 Comments
"Red Hat, the top seller of the Linux operating system, will begin offering a higher-end and more specialized version of Linux later this year that won't be as easy to find as the current all-purpose package. Red Hat will demonstrate its coming Advanced Server product this week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York and plans to begin selling it mid-spring, said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at the Durham, N.C., company." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.
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NetBSD Enters the Desktop

  Submitted by Robson NetBSD 1 Comment
As if the Desktop Linux Revolution weren't enough, Wasabi Systems, Inc. will unveil what is being described as the "first commercial NetBSD boxed set" at LinuxWorld next week. Wasabi's new product is called the "NetBSD 1.5.2 Package Release for Desktops", and "comes ready to install, in a nice friendly box complete with CDs and a manual," said Wasabi founder and CEO Perry Metzger.
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The Life and Times of the Multics OS

OS News 1 Comment
Descriptive quote from the article: "Multics is a mainframe timesharing OS that started as far back as 1965 and was put to rest after a long life in October 2000. You may be asking why you need to know more about an OS that is no longer in use. The answer to that question is, "You'll never know where you're going if you don't know where you've been." Although this saying is a bit corny, it is especially true of Multics because of its influence on today's mainstream operating systems."
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Mandrake 8.2 Beta1, RootLinux and CRUX Released

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 23 Comments
Mandrake Software released the first beta of their Mandrake 8.2 Linux distribution in two ISO CDs. They include kernel 2.4.17, XFree86 4.2, glibc 2.2.4, Window Maker 0.8, apache 1.3.22, Evolution 1.01, KDE 2.2.2, galeon 1.0, mozilla 0.9.7 and a lot of Mandrake Tools-specific changes & updates (screenshots). In related news, RootLinux released version 1.3pre1 which contains many updates and bugfixes. This release uses CUPS as printing system and PureFTPD as the default FTP daemon. The installation has been improved, and ext3 support was added. It also contains Linux 2.4.17, glibc 2.2.5, KDE 2.2.2, and XFree86 4.2.0. Recently, CRUX 0.9.2 was also released with many new features. Both the CRUX and RootLinux developers were interviewed by OSNews three months ago.
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Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4, Part II

Java 11 Comments
"Dig deeper with us into Sun's enhancements. You can now assert in Java, and you'll like the new logging capabilities. We've got benchmark tests of the new graphics routines, too. Java coders can now do what C programmers have done from the start with new classes for Regular Expressions. Pattern matching is now a piece of cake. Yes, it's still beta, but here's a preview of what's faster--and slower." Read the second part of the interesting Java 1.4 preview at ExtremeTech.
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Lindows Sneak Preview Released

  Submitted by Dave Merrill Linspire 37 Comments
OSNews reader Dave Merrill was lucky to get access to a preview version of the Lindows OS and inform us with his findings. Read more about Dave's mini-preview. In the meantime, NewsForge also published a more extensive preview of the Linux-based OS which aims to run Windows software out of the box without the need of a Windows operating system installed. The NewsForge article also includes three screenshots.
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Journal File Systems in Linux

General Development 1 Comment
"First of all, there is no a clear winner, XFS is better in some aspects or cases, ReiserFS in others, and both are better than Ext2 in the sense that they are comparable in performance (again, sometimes faster, sometimes slightly slower) but they a journaling file systems, and you already know what are their advantages... And perhaps the most important moral, is that Linux buffer/cache is really impressive and affected, positively, all the figures of my compilations, copies and random reads and writes. So, I would say, buy memory and go journaled ASAP..." Read the rest of the 8-pages long article.
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A .NET Primer for Mac Users

.NET 8 Comments
"I wrote this after reading a confusing rant called 'Microsoft's .NET & The Advent Of (More) Nuisance Technology' on a site called MacObserver. The mispresentation of .NET in that story concerned me — not because it was negative, but because the author confused .NET with Microsoft's forthcoming web services (then called Hailstorm, now called '.NET My Services'). This is like critisizing MacOSX because you don't like iPhoto." Read the rest of the easy-to-follow presentation of .NET.
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Intel Designs a 64bit x86 CPU?

  Submitted by Chris Lattner Intel 20 Comments
Rumors abound that Intel is designing 64bit extensions to it's Pentium line, in case Itanium turns out to be a flop: "Intel's decision to back the novel Itanium architecture had upset a small group of Intel engineers in Oregon, who preferred to build on the x86 legacy. When AMD released the specifications of its upcoming 64-bit chips in the summer of 2000, these ``cowboy'' engineers decided that Intel needed to match its rival. They began developing their own 64-bit extensions to the Pentium line, making sure the code was compatible with AMD's design." Update: MercuryCenter has an article about this too.
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Is There Life Outside Microsoft Office?

Office 21 Comments
"There are alternatives to the ubiquitous applications suite, but in most cases, they're not worth the trouble. Do you need to have Microsoft Office on your PC? Because Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have become the de facto standards for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it's tough to do any sort of business on a computer without being able to read and edit files in those formats. But if you're willing to make some compromises, there are alternatives." Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek. In a related note, Gobe released a new demo of gobeProductive3.
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