OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Windows 7 Hits 3% Market Share, Approaches 4%

Thom Holwerda 2009-11-02 Windows 262 Comments

Windows 7 has been out and about for little over a week now, and as it turns out, Microsoft's new baby is doing relatively well. That is, according to the figures by NetApplications: Windows 7 already reached the 3% mark this weekend, and is already closing in on the 4% mark.

ZFS Gets Deduplication

Thom Holwerda 2009-11-02 Solaris 20 Comments

ZFS has received built-in deduplication. "Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data. Dedup is generally either file-level, block-level, or byte-level. Chunks of data - files, blocks, or byte ranges - are checksummed using some hash function that uniquely identifies data with very high probability. Chunks of data are remembered in a table of some sort that maps the data's checksum to its storage location and reference count. When you store another copy of existing data, instead of allocating new space on disk, the dedup code just increments the reference count on the existing data. When data is highly replicated, which is typical of backup servers, virtual machine images, and source code repositories, deduplication can reduce space consumption not just by percentages, but by multiples."

Web Open Font Format Backed by Mozilla, Type Foundries

Thom Holwerda 2009-11-02 Internet 4 Comments

"Type designers and Web designers have reached a consensus on a format specification for embedding fonts on the Web. Mozilla is already including support for the font format in Firefox 3.6, and wide adoption could come sooner than many expected."

Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?

Guest post by Pobrecito Hablador 2009-11-02 Solaris 43 Comments

One of the advantages of ZFS is that it doesn't need a fsck. Replication, self-healing and scrubbing are a much better alternative. After a few years of ZFS life, can we say it was the correct decision? The reports in the mailing list are a good indicator of what happens in the real world, and it appears that once again, reality beats theory. The author of the article analyzes the implications of not having a fsck tool and tries to explain why he thinks Sun will add one at some point.

Submitted by Moochman 2009-11-02 Wireless 2 Comments

CNet interviews Niklas Savander, executive VP of Services at Nokia, to find out about the future of the Ovi store and Nokia's plans to steal back market share in America. He candidly admits to Nokia's past shortfallings, such as lack of integration between services, poor user experience, and Nokia's long lack of focus on the American market, and hints at what it is doing to rectify them, including the planned launch of a co-branded AT&T/Ovi app store.

Submitted by diegocg 2009-11-02 Linux 2 Comments

"Sheepdog is a new third party open source project around kvm providing distributed storage management features. Sheepdog provides high availability to kvm guests by providing block level storage volumes to virtual machines similar to Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). In fact one of the items on the sheepdog project todo list is to support the Amazon EBS API. Sheepdog is designed to scale to hundreds of nodes. You can think of this technique as striping your virtual disk data across multiple nodes similar to what raid does. The project is still very early in its development cycle but already provides basic functionality."

Adobe Pushes Flash, PDF for Open Government, Misses Irony

Thom Holwerda 2009-11-02 In the News 2 Comments

"Adobe is pushing hard to get Flash, PDF, and other technologies used to realize recent open government initiatives. The problem is that the technologies fall short of the goal of full accessibility, and cause problems for those seeking to use government-supplied data in any meaningful way."

Submitted by poundsmack 2009-11-02 macOS 104 Comments

Anyone who hangs around on websites with information about installing Mac OS X on non-Apple labelled computers has probably already encountered this report, but it's newsworthy anyway. The upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.6.2 will remove support for the Intel Atom line of processors from Mac OS X.

Ubuntu, Language, Rebel EFI

Thom Holwerda 2009-11-01 OS News 17 Comments

Another week gone bye-bye, another Week in Review. Ubuntu 9.10 was the star of the week of course, but we also talked about language, the HTC Hero, and wall warts. Yes we did.

Review: HTC Hero

Eugenia Loli 2009-10-31 Wireless 22 Comments

PureMobile sent us in the GSM version of the HTC Hero, one of the most popular Android-based smartphones out there. There are already a number of in-depth reviews about this phone out there (here's one), but here's my own take on what I liked, and what I disliked.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Brings Windows 7 Integration

Thom Holwerda 2009-10-30 Mozilla, Gecko 49 Comments

Mozilla has released the first beta release of Firefox 3.6, which comes with some nice Windows 7 integration features. More specifically, the Firefox 3.6 beta integrates with the new taskbar in Windows 7.

Review: Hackable Linux NAS, the D-Link DNS-323

David Adams 2009-10-30 Hardware 25 Comments

The D-Link DNS-323 is a bargain-priced, consumer-grade network storage enclosure, similar to countless others. It's made of cheap plastic, has uninspired design, and a clunky web-based management interface. It's also brilliant, and if you have any hacker in you at all, you should buy one.

Nintendo Sees 52% Profit Drop

Thom Holwerda 2009-10-30 Games 53 Comments

Thanks to the massive success of the Wii and DS game consoles, Nintendo was able to turn the tide and once again become the number one game company in the world. As with any honeymoon, however, it must come to an end at some point. Nintendo reported its financial results for the first half of 2009 yesterday, and it didn't look good.

A Good HTPC Linux Distribution

Thom Holwerda 2009-10-30 Linux 76 Comments

I'm in a bit of a pickle here. I have an Atom 330-based tiny computer which I use as my HTPC. It performed its job fine running Windows 7 and Boxee, and over the past few months, it ran Mac OS X Leopard with Plex. Now, however, I want to try Linux as an HTPC operating system, but I kind of ran into a roadblock there with Ubuntu 9.10 - so the question is: what is a good HTPC Linux distribution?

iTunes 9.0.2 Breaks webOS Sync Again

Thom Holwerda 2009-10-30 Wireless 45 Comments

And the back-and-forth goes on. "Here we go again. Apple has updated iTunes to version 9.0.2 and Palm Pre sync is dead again using webOS 1.2.1, despite Palm's Hurculean efforts to spoof nearly every aspect of USB identification known to mankind. As with previous breakages, iTunes does launch when you connect a Pre with Media Mode, but it doesn't appear as a device on the sidebar. Pre owners can at least take comfort in knowing that Apple's main goal here was adding support for the new AppleTV format, but breaking Pre sync support was a nice cherry for them."

Hewlett Packard Superdome Demo Day

David Adams 2009-10-29 Unix 30 Comments

I had the pleasure earlier this month of attending a demo day at HP's Cupertino campus to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Superdome server, see what's new in the high-end server market and learn about what's going on with HP-UX.

RISC OS on the Beagle Board: You Can Help

Submitted by Andrew Duffell 2009-10-29 RISC OS 15 Comments

With all the good news around Haiku and Amiga/MorphOS, you'd almost forget that other "old" alternative operating system, with most of its following residing in the United Kingdom: RISC OS. This operating system is fighting a predictable problem: a lack of hardware.

Microsoft’s Signature Initiative: Crapware-Free Computers

Thom Holwerda 2009-10-29 Microsoft 61 Comments

We all know that Microsoft doesn't actually make computers. It makes the software, and then lets an almost infinite amount of manufacturers build computers that can run its software. These manufacturers often make a mess of things, delivering computers filled to the brim with crapware. What would happen if Microsoft made computers? Well, for one, they would be void of crapware. Two, they would help users install the software they want before leaving the store - including software from competitors.

Submitted by shanecoughlan 2009-10-29 Open Source 3 Comments

Armijn Hemel (gpl-violtions.org, Loohuis Consulting) and Shane Coughlan (Opendawn, FSFE) complete a trilogy of articles examining FOSS licensing issues and best practice on LWN.net with an outline of FOSS license compliance for companies. Readers may also be interested in part one, introducing the topic and describing what developers can do to protect their rights, and part two, examining the field of compliance engineering.

Ubuntu 9.10 Released

Thom Holwerda 2009-10-29 Ubuntu 99 Comments

We're a little late, but Real Life got in the way, so here we finally are. Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition has been released. This version focusses on improvements in cloud computing on the server using Eucalyptus, further improvements in boot speed, as well as development on Netbook Remix. The related KDE, Xfce, and other variants have been released as well. Update by ELQ: Just a quick note to say that one of my Creative Commons videos was selected to be part of Ubuntu's Free Culture Showcase package that comes by default with the new Ubuntu version!