Haiku at LugRadio Live USA 2008

Haiku 10 Comments
As of Late, the Haiku project has been making some major steps forward, most notably the ability to 'self host', one of the most important milestones for the upcoming alpha release. In addition to development progress, Haiku is also making a name or itself in the Free software world in general, by attending conferences, for instance. Last weekend, Haiku was present at the LugRadio Live USA 2008 event, held in San Fransisco.
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Novell: ‘The Standalone OS Is Dead’

Novell and Ximian 48 Comments
Novell's Nat Friedman told InternetNews.com: "The basic concept here is that the standalone operating system is dead." Friedman is Novell's Chief Technology Officer. He added: "The days in which people buy operating systems on their own and then build a stack from there will look like home-built automobiles in the future - people aren't going to do this anymore." This is not the first time some big company predicts the end of the traditional operating system.
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‘A Year Later, Sales of Linux on Dell Computers Continue to Grow’

  Submitted by Moulinneuf Hardware 46 Comments
About a year ago, Dell made an important move. Pushed by thousands of comments in its IdeaStorm website, the company started offering Ubuntu preloaded on a small selection of its machines. Initially only a US-based program, but later on, some European countries followed. However, criticism was not absent; buyers complained the machines were hard to find on Dell's website and that Dell did not do enough to promote sales of the Ubuntu machines. Today, Dell has commented on the whole Dell-Ubuntu marriage.
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Linux 2.6.25 Released

  Submitted by RJop Linux 36 Comments
Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.25 of the Linux kernel. "It's been long promised, but there it is now. Special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before."
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Microsoft Charts Its Road Map for Windows Embedded

Wireless 26 Comments
Microsoft has laid out a new roadmap for the development of Windows Embedded at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2008. The Embedded roadmap outlines the "renaming of its family of products and plans for new solutions in key device categories". Kevin Dallaes, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business, explains: "With today's strategic road map announcement, our aim is to present the evolving Windows Embedded product family in an intuitive fashion, making it easier for our customers to choose the right platforms and tools for their needs."
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BeleniX 0.7 Released

  Submitted by shivakumargn Solaris 4 Comments
After a long gap and lots of things happening behind the scenes, the BeleniX team is pleased to announce the availability of BeleniX 0.7, an OpenSolaris-based community distribution. This release marks a considerable change in the evolution of BeleniX. Read on for the details.
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Atheros Hires ath5k Developer

  Submitted by Rahul Linux 8 Comments
LWN reports: When kernel developers talk about problematic hardware vendors, Atheros often appears near the top of their lists. So this announcement from Luis Rodriguez, a developer of the reverse-engineered ath5k driver, is intriguing: "I write to you to inform you that I have decided to join Atheros as a full time employee, as a Software Engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel." What will come of this remains to be seen, but if it truly signals a change of heart at Atheros, it is a most welcome development.
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Open Graphics Project To Announce Pre-Orders

  Submitted by irbis 3D 24 Comments
Open Graphics Project founder Timothy Miller recently noted on the project's mailing list that they are set to announce that their first hardware, the OGD1, is ready for pre-order. "The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now," he began, explaining that they've been setting up a way to process pre-orders for the first 100 boards. The board will retail at USD 1500, with a USD 100 discount offered for the first 100 pre-orders. "These are pre-orders, not orders," Timothy continued, "that means the lead time is unpredictable. We don't have a stock. We will purchase a stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will be unable to fulfil them; all pre-orders would be cancelled, and no one would be charged anything."
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2008 Server OS Reliability Survey

  Submitted by R_T_F_M OS News 20 Comments
Yankee Group's second annual Server Operating System Reliability survey polled 700 users from 27 countries worldwide. The latest independent, non-sponsored Web-based survey revealed that all versions of UNIX -- which typically carry very high workloads -- are near bulletproof, achieving 99.999% reliability. IBM's AIX UNIX led all server operating systems for reliability with just over 30 minutes of per server annual downtime but Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems also got high scores.
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IBM Launches Pilot Program for Migrating to Mac

  Submitted by Hakime Apple 24 Comments
As further evidence of the growing interest in Macs among enterprise customers, IBM's Research Information Services launched an internal pilot program designed to study the possibility of moving significant numbers of employees to the Mac platform. The study has already found an enthusiastic response from participants and is helping to drive Mac support for IBM's business applications.
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Fat, Fatter, Fattest: Microsoft’s Kings of Bloat

  Submitted by Craig Barth Microsoft 88 Comments
"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007, which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes more than 12 times as much memory and nearly three times as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just seven short years ago, Office 2000. Despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call The Great Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC). In fact, the hard numbers above represent what is perhaps the first-ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption. In this article I hope to further quantify the impact of TGMLC and to track its effects across four distinct generations of Microsoft's desktop computing software stack."
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Sun Touts Big Plans for OpenSolaris As First Release Nears

  Submitted by Moochman Solaris 28 Comments
"Sun's Ian Murdock gave a presentation about OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live this past weekend. He hopes to expose open source enthusiasts to unique Sun technologies by creating a cohesive distribution that will provide a complete environment that is adequate for day-to-day use. This will involve bringing together the Solaris operating system and a diverse assortment of open source community projects and "adding a package management system to hold all these pieces together," Murdock stated. The final release will take place in May and the distribution will adhere to a six-month release cycle, just like Fedora and Ubuntu."
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Psystar Offers USD 400 Mac Clone

Apple 143 Comments
The website of a Miami-based networking and security solutions reseller became inaccessible Monday, shortly after the company began advertising an unauthorized Mac clone for a fraction of the cost of Apple's cheapest system. Dubbed OpenMac, the USD 400 offering from Psystar Corporation is described as 'a low-cost high-performance computing platform' based on the ongoing OSX86Project - a hacker-based initiative aimed at maintaining a version of the Mac OS X operating system for everyday PCs. The website is back online now, and the machine has been renamed to Open Computer. Update: Psystar says they will continue to sell the Open Computer system, despite the fact that it appears to violate Apple's EULA. "We're not breaking any laws," they insisted.
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Syllable Runs on the Asus Eee PC

  Submitted by Kaj de Vos Syllable, AtheOS 15 Comments
Michael Saunders got Syllable Desktop to run on his new Asus Eee PC (screenshot). There is some work to do to support all hardware, but most functionality already works. Michael reports that video, audio, touchpad, USB and battery monitor all work. Widescreen video and network don't and there may be reliability problems with USB storage devices. As installing Syllable from a USB device doesn't work yet, Michael used an inventive method for installation. It can be done by imaging your Eee drive with the dd utility (from Linux), installing Syllable on it through QEmu and then dd'ing the image back to the real drive. Note that the drive number needs to be adjusted in the GrUB boot file. The project is looking into distributing Syllable especially for the Eee PC in this form.
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