OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

First Screenshot: Beagleboard Runs RISC OS 5 Desktop

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-11 RISC OS 3 Comments

We already reported on the port of RISC OS 5 to the Beagleboard, but at that time, it couldn't yet boot the graphical shell. This has now been resolved, and there's a screenshot to prove it. The code should already be in the ROOL CVS repository, so adventurous Beagleboard owners can start playing with it.

Source: Intel To Be Found Guilty of Monopoly Abuse

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-11 Intel 52 Comments

Microsoft isn't the only company in the technology industry with a monopoly. Its partner in crime, Intel, has often been accused of monopoly abuse as well, and is currently under scrutiny by the same European Commission who fined Microsoft. Sources have told eWeek (which generally has a good track record) that Intel will indeed be found guilty this week of abusing its monopoly position to stifle the competition.

Knee Deep in UNIX Network Analysis

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-11 Unix 4 Comments

You can find out a lot about your network by using a variety of different tools. Understanding the layout of your network, and where packets are going, and what people are doing is important. This tutorial examines techniques for monitoring the traffic and content of your UNIX network and how to read and diagnose problems on your network.

What’s Using All My Linux Native Memory?

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-11 Java No Comments

An understanding of native memory is essential when you design and run large Java applications. The lack of predictable behaviour means there's no one simple way to identify native-memory exhaustion. Instead, you need to use data from the OS and from the Java runtime to confirm the diagnosis. To get the best performance from your Java application, you must understand how the application affects the Java runtime's native-memory use.

Episode 8: All Roads Lead to The Finder

Kroc 2009-05-10 Podcasts 28 Comments

Special Offer: 50% Extra Free. I hope you have your tea/coffee cup primed for this one-and-a-half hour edition of the show! We cover a lot of ground (and everything in between) on the Windows 7 RC, the Kindle DX (is that like the Nathan TX?), application and OS updates and finally what would we change about the Mac Pro and Mac OS X.

GNU, Psystar, Charlie

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-10 OS News 14 Comments

And another week passes us by. This week we were informed about two projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives, FreeBSD, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Windows 7 did new releases, Psystar replied to Apple's allegations (and the Apple world completely ignored it), and Chrome users were the most up-to-date with their browsers. This week's my take is a prelude to the one for next week.

Linux Mint 7: 10 New Feature Videos

Submitted by Andrew Weber 2009-05-09 Linux 19 Comments

Linux Mint 7 RC1 has recently been released, and a poster over at EasyLinuxCDs.com has been good enough to detail some of the features in ten different videos. He details everything from installation to mintUpdate to even small features, such as the Xchat app. Though the bulk of the videos seem a bit elementary for most readers here, I at least found Linux Mint 7 a very good-looking system aesthetically and technically and would like to test it out sometime in the near future.

What Would You Change About the Mac Pro, Mac OS X?

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-09 Apple 156 Comments

Since it's weekend, which usually equates to no news, we figured we'd follow in Engadget's footsteps by asking you, our dear and loving readers, what you would change about Apple's current Mac Pro. Engadget readers already had a few things to say - this is the internet after all. And since this is OSNews, we add a question of our own: what would you change about Mac OS X?

Botnet Kill Switch: 100000 BSODs

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 Privacy, Security 36 Comments

The past few years, it seemed as if virus writers had moved away from doing actual damage to systems to instead focus on stealth, so that infected machines can silently, and unknowingly, be used for all sorts of malicious practices. Sadly, there are still those crackers out there that prefer the old-fashioned approach to these matters. The result: 100000 ruined Windows machines.

Sun Shareholders Sue to Block Oracle Acquisition

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 Oracle and SUN 11 Comments

Sun Microsystems shareholders have filed three separate class action lawsuits to block a $7.4 billion acquisition by Oracle, the company revealed in a 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lawsuits allege Sun's board didn't live up to its fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders when it accepted Oracle's acquisition offer, saying "the consideration offered in the proposed transaction is unfair and inadequate."

Industrial-Strength Python Testing Frameworks

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 General Development 3 Comments

The recent emergence of industrial-strength Python testing frameworks means that Python tests are being written more succinctly, more uniformly, and with better reporting of results than ever before. Adopting one of the new generation of Python testing frameworks will provide concise idioms and uniform testing techniques that, in the past, every Python project had to supply for itself.

Guest post by Rahul 2009-05-08 Fedora Core 21 Comments

Red Hat, which started the HAL project many years ago, has deprecated it in favor of a new initiative called DeviceKit. David Zeuthen, primary developer of DeviceKit, has posted on his blog about the work done by the Red Hat Desktop team in Fedora 11 for improving the storage layer in GNOME by taking advantage of DeviceKit. This includes desktop notification if your hard disk is failing, a desktop utility to handle RAID and LVM storage, a replacement for the venerable gfloppy, and many others. Look at his blog for a number of screenshots showing the details. "The GNOME 2.26 release in Fedora 11 will ship with a completely different stack for handling storage devices. The plan is to land all this work in the upstream GNOME 2.28 release and most of that work is done already."

Oracle To Invest in SPARC, Wants to Be Like Apple, Cisco

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 Oracle and SUN 28 Comments

Ever since news got out that Oracle snapped up Sun Microsystems, a big question mark has been hanging over Sun's SPARC business. Would Oracle kill it off? Sell it? Or would they actually invest in creating a top-to-bottom hardware+software stack, like Apple and Cisco? Oracle's CEO has given the answer. And yes, that's a new category icon up there.

Interview: PiTiVi Video Editor Maintainer Edward Hervey

Submitted by Christian Schaller 2009-05-08 Multimedia, AV 5 Comments

In this interview with Edward Hervey, the PiTiVi maintainer, GNOMEDesktop.org talks about the history of the project, its current status, and plans going forward. PiTiVi aims at being the premier open source video editing solution and with current developments that seems to be within reach.

FreeBSD Status Report January-March 2009

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2009-05-08 FreeBSD 20 Comments

After having released FreeBSD 7.2 just a few days ago, the FreeBSD project now sends out a new quarterly status report, with information about development projects in progress. This report contains news on Clang replacing GCC, VirtualBox improvements, upcoming support for an NVIDIA 64-bit driver, some DTrace news, and more.

Submitted by lemur2 2009-05-08 KDE 36 Comments

It slipped by us, but the KDE team has released another minor bugfix release of KDE 4.2, version 4.2.3, a few days ago. Being a bugfix release, there are few user-visible changes, but still, there are a few things that stand out. "Online IMAP filtering in KMail has been fixed, KMail's system tray icon now reacts to changes to folder properties and updates the number of emails shown there automatically, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML - painting and interoperability with web standards has been further improved."

Submitted by lemur2 2009-05-08 Office 38 Comments

OpenOffice.org 3.1 has been released. "The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the general availability of OpenOffice.org 3.1, a significant upgrade to the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. Since OpenOffice.org 3.0 was launched last October, over 60 million downloads have been recorded from the OpenOffice.org website alone. Released in more than 90 languages and available as a free download on all major computing platforms, OpenOffice.org 3.1 looks set to break these records." There's a guide to new features, and you can download OpenOffice.org 3.1 here.

Guest post by Rahul 2009-05-08 Multimedia, AV 11 Comments

Chris Montgomery, otherwise known as Monty, is the founder of Xiph.org foundation and creator of the Ogg container format. He has been sponsored by Red Hat for several years to improve the codec quality of Theora and the next generation version, called Thusnelda, is already proving to be better than H264 as bitrate increases. Monty has posted some test results demonstrating the improvements. Chris Blizzard from Mozilla Foundation has some updates as well.

Warp Drive: Might Actually Not Be Impossible

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 Geek stuff 38 Comments

Today, the new Star Trek film has seen its official premiere here in The Netherlands tonight, and in honour of that, I figured an article on Space.com about the possibility of faster-than-light travel would make a good fit on OSNews. The article is quite technical, so bear with me on this one. I hope I get everything right.

Scripting the Vim Editor with Vimscript

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 General Development 2 Comments

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.