OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

RPM 5.0.0 Released

Submitted by Sabz 2008-01-06 General Development 46 Comments

After seven months of comprehensive development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. This version builds portably on a wide variety of Unix platforms and includes initial support for XAR as a package format, among other features.

Submitted by koki 2008-01-05 Haiku 3 Comments

Haikuware carries a Q&A of Ingo Weinhold, one of the main contributing developers to the Haiku Project. In this mini-interview, Ingo talks about his beginnings in the community, his motivations for adopting BeOS, his involvement in Haiku development, and a bit about his professional work too. He also gives a bit of insight about his Haiku-related subprojects, and expresses his determination to port the development tool chain and optimize critical services as the first steps to make Haiku usable as a full time OS for early adopters. “Being a professional Java developer and enjoying Java hacking,” Ingo also seems to be thrilled by the recently announced Haiku Java Team and the prospect of finally getting Java on Haiku.

Linux Time Machine Alternative Reviewed

Submitted by TGB 2008-01-05 Linux 39 Comments

"If there is a defining feature in Apple's Leopard, it's Time Machine. As cool as it may be, the fact is that we, as Linux users, are obviously not going to see much benefit from this is pitiful. So it's a good thing that open source developers have taken it upon themselves to create something similar, be it not a 'pretty' alternative."

Submitted by souneedalink 2008-01-05 Red Hat 22 Comments

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said yesterday - his fourth day on the job - that he’s angling for a showdown with two tech titans in what he describes as a struggle to protect information sharing in software development. No longer satisfied just defending a company as he did while working at Delta Air Lines, Whitehurst is ready to go on the offensive against Oracle and Microsoft as he builds Red Hat toward billion-dollar annual revenues.

Format Wars Are Over and Blu-Ray Won?

Eugenia Loli 2008-01-05 Multimedia, AV 129 Comments

While this might be a bold statement, all things point to this. Blu-Ray was already winning in market share slowly but surely, and today's Warner decision to go BD-only puts the final nails into this HD format war as Warner is the biggest movie distributor. The HD-DVD Group didn't seem to know about Warner's decision and they canceled their CES conference out of the blu tonight, amidst making vague references to possible legal action. My take: I wish Blu-Ray had a region-free policy like HD-DVD does. Living in USA today but one day moving to Europe, it will have an impact in my media library.

Aaron Seigo on KDE 4.0

Thom Holwerda 2008-01-04 KDE 93 Comments

KDE's Aaron Seigo (who owes me a Martini) wrote about a few often-heard misconceptions and questions regarding KDE 4.0, which is supposed to be released January 11th. "Now that 4.0.0 is tagged and out and that bit of worry and concern is behind me for the moment, I wanted to take a moment to talk really bluntly about 4.0. In particular, I'm going to address some of the common memes in fairly random order that I see about kde 3.5 and 4.0. I'm going to speak bluntly (though not rudely) so prepare yourself."

Submitted by koki 2008-01-04 Haiku 41 Comments

According to a news post on the Haiku project website, a new port team is being formed to bring Java technologies to the Haiku platform. The goal of the Haiku Java Team is to port OpenJDK to Haiku, and they would like to see the port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project. The Haiku developers have already been in contact with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue their objective, and a formal proposal has also been submitted for consideration by the OpenJDK project. The Haiku Java Team is an initiative lead by Bryan Varner, who together with Andrew Bachmann worked on the port of Java to BeOS in the past (demo video).

Maudlin Over RISC OS

Submitted by teigetje 2008-01-03 RISC OS 6 Comments

"New Year is traditionally a time in which the achievements, surprises and disappointments of the previous year are reflected upon. Often, in spite of the fireworks and wild parties, time is set aside in which to dwell upon one's private thoughts. As 2008 is now underway I've found myself mulling over my involvement with RISC OS. Whether I like it or not, my involvement in the Acorn and RISC OS scene has been a significant part of my life over the past 27 years."

Running Classic on Intel Macs

Submitted by david freadman 2008-01-03 macOS 22 Comments

"When Steve Jobs announced Apples transition to Intel's x86 processor line, a huge stir occurred among some Mac OS X users who depend on 'Classic' the OS9 environment in Mac OS X for their day to day Mac usage, as Mac OS X on Intel means no more 'Classic' and they were right. Rosetta allows PowerPC applications to run on x86 through JIT (Just In Time) architecture emulation, but its translation is not on a low enough level within OS X to allow 'Classic' to work on x86 and as such those among us who use OS9 applications have been left out in the cold. Until now that is: a project called 'Sheep Shaver' was created to allow BeOS on PowerPC emulate the PowerPC architecture to run another PowerPC operating system on top of BeOS. This application was ported to Mac OS X with the demise of Be Inc. and has since been ported to Mac OS X on Intel processors."

Lenovo Has Eyes on Consumer PC Market

Thom Holwerda 2008-01-03 Hardware 23 Comments

Lenovo is undertaking an Olympic-size effort to establish itself as a consumer PC brand. The Chinese PC maker has found great success with the iconic ThinkPad brand of commercial laptops, a business it purchased from IBM. And now it's taking the world stage with a new line of consumer-focused notebooks called IdeaPad. There will also be a desktop line called IdeaCentre.

First Look: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008

Thom Holwerda 2008-01-03 Office 34 Comments

Ars reviews Office:Mac 2008, and concludes: "Perhaps the best thing that can be said about software that one uses in the course of working is that even if it doesn't make the work fun, it doesn't make it any worse, and that's certainly the story with Office 2008. Those spreadsheets, presentations and software reviews won't write themselves, but now it's a deal easier to make them look like they did. That it does that in just the way you'd want a great Macintosh program to behave is good news for Office workers."

‘Ultra-Pretty’ Dell Crystal LCD Monitor Now Available

Thom Holwerda 2008-01-03 Hardware 16 Comments

I don't usually do stories like this one, but I love this design so much I wanted to share it with you. "Dell has flaunted this gorgeous monitor for a while in various trade shows and press events, always saying that it's just a design concept and not available yet. That all changes now, because the 22-inch Dell Crystal LCD display is suddenly a real product. Just in time for CES, this beauty is set to ship in the next few days, and even though its spec list isn't as high-end as we had hoped, it's still so pretty, if it were smaller we'd want to wear it as a necklace." On a related note, Dell machines are appearing at Best Buy.

IcedTea 1.5 Adds PowerPC Java Port

Submitted by Mark Wielaard 2008-01-03 Java 9 Comments

The IcedTea project added a PowerPC Java port (both 32 and 64 bit) of OpenJDK. IcedTea 1.5 now also tracks the mercurial repo, provides better GNU/Linux integration by using standard system libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, giflib) and can be bootstrapped with the free gcj/ecj/classpath toolchain. OpenJDK just accepted a new porters group and Gary Benson wrote a guide to porting IcedTea that might be the start of a lot of other Java ports.

Submitted by WillM 2008-01-02 Fedora Core 27 Comments

"Anyone who has installed Linux on Virtual PC/Virtual Server knows that while yes, Linux is supported on these platforms, and yes, it does run well after getting it setup - installation can be a downright pain. It is for this reason that I take great pride in the fact that installing Linux on the Hyper-V beta release is a breeze."

Submitted by vermaden 2008-01-01 FreeBSD 55 Comments

FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks."

Exclaim 0.2.0 Released

Submitted by Alex 2008-01-01 OS News 14 Comments

Version 0.2.0 of the Exclaim operating system has been released. "Exclaim is a project aiming to create a lightweight, simple and easy to use operating system from scratch, with POSIX-compliance to allow existing UNIX applications to run on it. It is intended to be suitable to run on old hardware while still being usable at a reasonable speed. The 0.2.0 release supports reading from ATA hard disks and Ext2 filesystems, and includes a simple shell plus a few other programs."

Submitted by Adam Scheinberg 2008-01-01 Apple 17 Comments

Engadget reports: "First unveiled nearly a year ago at Macworld 2007, the MacBook-based, Wacom-modified Modbook has definitely seen its share of delays, although in the days and months since, the 13.3-inch slate has gained the distinction of being one of the few pieces of non-Cupertino, Apple-approved hardware. The world's first OS X tablet can be yours immediately starting at USD 2290."

SharpOS Releases First Milestone

Submitted by William Lahti 2008-01-01 .NET 27 Comments

SharpOS 0.0.1 has been released. "The SharpOS project is aimed at writing an operating system in 100% C#. This originally proved to be a problem of nearly philosophical proportions because C# is a managed language, and by nature isn’t designed for such low-level uses as developing an operating system kernel. Please note that although our goal is to create an operating system in C#, the infrastructure we have created allows kernels to be written in any language that targets the Common Intermediate Language bytecodes and exposes pointers and unsafe code."

Happy New Year… Tell Us What to Expect in 2008

Adam Scheinberg 2008-01-01 In the News 79 Comments

From all of us at OSNews, we'd like to wish you a happy and healthy new year. In honor of the new year, we'd like to ask you: what headlines do you expect to read in the tech world in 2008? Are you expecting iPhone rev2? Or maybe Vista SP1's success? Perhaps Hardy Heron's world domination? Will Google's Android swallow the cellphone market? Can Facebook continue to rule the roost in social networking? Tell us what you expect in the comments!

Future AMD GPUs To Be More Open-Source Friendly?

Submitted by anonymous 2007-12-30 AMD 61 Comments

"AMD is on the heels of releasing the next set of GPU programming documentation to aide in the development of the open-source R500/600 drivers (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd). It's already been discussed what this NDA-free documentation release will have, but one of the questions that have repeatedly come up is if/when AMD will release information on accelerated video playback. AMD's John Bridgman has now stated what they plan to release in the video realm as well as a new requirement for their future graphics processors: being open-source friendly while avoiding DRM."