Syllable Server Emulator Images

  Submitted by Kaj de Vos Syllable, AtheOS 1 Comment
The Syllable project has published the first two preconfigured virtual machine images for trying out Syllable Server without installation. One is for VMware . It can also be used with QEmu and VirtualBox. The other is for other emulators such as Bochs, or also QEmu . The latter unpacks to a file of one gigabyte. Detailed instructions are here. Also, for history purposes, two images were published of the last version of AtheOS, Syllable's predecessor . Here is a screenshot of AtheOS running on Syllable.
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‘Home Is Where My Server Is’

Windows 49 Comments
"When Microsoft announced Windows Home Server earlier this year, it was greeted with a mixture of curious disdain and eagerness. Some questioned what the product offered over existing solutions, while others welcomed it with open arms. It's at once hard to explain and easy to understand what Windows Home Server is, but it's worth getting to know the newest addition to the Windows family."
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Red Hat Global Desktop To Appear in November

  Submitted by Rahul Red Hat 55 Comments
"When Red Hat announced its upcoming Linux desktop at its annual summit in May, the company predicted the Red Hat Global Desktop would be out by September. Now, delayed a bit, the new desktop Linux will be appearing in November, company executives are saying. The delay was caused, Gerry Riveros, Red Hat senior product marketing manager for enterprise Linux, said in an exclusive interview with DesktopLinux.com, by Red Hat's desire to support Intel's full PC hardware platform lines."
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More on OpenBSD’s New Compiler

  Submitted by Valour OpenBSD 68 Comments
"A few weeks ago, the OpenBSD Project announced that the Portable C Compiler had been added to the OpenBSD source tree. There has already been some explanation of why the traditional GNU Compiler Collection is troublesome and why a new compiler is needed, but there are still some details left uncovered. In this interview, Theo de Raadt and Otto Moerbeek of the OpenBSD Project offer more information about PCC and GCC and where they are headed within the project."
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Learn F-Script in 20 Minutes

  Submitted by Philippe Mougin General Development 4 Comments
F-Script is an open-source scripting and interactive environment for Cocoa, the Mac OS X object system. It lets you easily play with the rich set of object-oriented frameworks provided by Apple and the Cocoa community. This new article, Learn F-Script in 20 Minutes, will teach you the basics of F-Script and show you how to use it to experiment with the advanced graphics capabilities of the Mac OS X Core Image framework. If you aren't using F-Script yet, this is your chance to learn how it can improve your productivity as well as those of the users of your own applications.
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On Four-Pixel-Stacks, Vultures, and Bending Girders

Legal 93 Comments
This week's 'big' news on OSNews was about software patents. You know, those things that say you cannot stack four pixels on top of one another unless you pay money to the guy who invented four-pixel-stacks (or the guy who bought the guy who invented four-pixel-stacks). A company called IP Innovation, LLC, has sued Novell and Red Hat for infringement of the company's IP portfolio. Software patents are of course generally completely ridiculous, so I will not focus on that here. I want to focus on something else.
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Preview: KDE 4

  Submitted by michuk KDE 135 Comments
"KDE 4 is coming. It’s starting to look and behave in a mature enough manner to use it on a normal desktop. This article is a little introduction as to what you should expect from the brand new KDE that is due out later this year." Lots of screenshots too.
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Review: openSUSE 10.3

  Submitted by apokryphos SuSE, openSUSE 28 Comments
"The openSUSE team officially released version 10.3 on October 4th. openSUSE is a popular German Linux distribution that Distrowatch.com lists as one of the 'top ten'. Underneath its new green artwork, version 10.3's improvements over previous versions include cutting down the time it takes to reach the graphical login screen; speeding up and streamlining its package management utility; and making it easier for users to install software using a new 'one-click install' process."
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Dell: Microsoft Warnings Haven’t Hurt Linux Uptake

  Submitted by Rahul Linux 14 Comments
Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Michael Dell. Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando on Thursday, Dell's chief executive officer said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft's claims. "On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows," said Dell. "We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down."
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Introducing the HAMMER Filesystem

  Submitted by Oliver BSD & Darwin 22 Comments
Matthew Dillon writes: "I am going to start committing bits and pieces of the HAMMER filesystem over the next two months. Note that the filesystem will not be operational until we get closer to the 2.0 release in December so these bits and pieces will not be tied into buildworld/buildkernel until then." Features: maximum size of half an exabyte, infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy, streaming backups, asynchronous transactional support (no long fscks to check disk state). Dillon also explains why he chose not to use Sun's ZFS.
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Interview: John Hull, Linux Manager at Dell

  Submitted by Hans Kwint Hardware 11 Comments
"It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell."
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Review: Mandriva Linux PowerPack 2008.0

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 52 Comments
Earlier this week, Mandriva released Mandriva Linux 2008.0, the latest version of their flagship Linux distribution. Mandriva was so kind as to provide me with a copy of Mandriva Linux 2008.0 PowerPack, the commercial version. Back when it was named Mandrake, it was my first ever Linux distribution (I bought a Linux magazine), so I have always had a special place for Mandriva. Read on for a review.
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Ubuntu 7.10 Release Candidate Released

  Submitted by Jeremy LaCroix Ubuntu 82 Comments
The release candidate for Ubuntu 7.10 has been released. "The Ubuntu developers are hurrying to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software that the open source and free software communities have to offer. This is the Ubuntu 7.10 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features. We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user. The final stable version will be released in October 2007."
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Red Hat Calm in Face of Microsoft’s Renewed Patent Claims

  Submitted by Rahul Red Hat 26 Comments
Red Hat is taking a business-as-usual stance in the face of renewed rumblings from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer over the need for Red Hat Linux users to pay up. Ballmer has repeatedly claimed that Microsoft IP is found in Linux. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us," said Ballmer at a Microsoft event last week in London. But Red Hat itself has adopted a stance that keeps it above the Microsoft patent fray. "At this point, please reference our previous statements on this topic," said a Red Hat spokesman contacted Tuesday about Microsoft's statements on Red Hat Linux users. The spokesman pointed out a Red Hat blog posted "after the last FUD statements from Microsoft" in May, she said. Shuttleworth agrees.
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Firefox Is Going Mobile

  Submitted by Rahul Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments
The developer team behind Firefox has announced plans to bring a mobile version of the technology to the market in 2008. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it," Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla developer known as 'schrep', wrote on the Mozillazine blog.
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New Features Discovered in Windows XP SP3: Is It Better Than Vista?

Windows 72 Comments
"The principal reason given for the tremendous under-the-hood changes to Windows unveiled early this year in Vista was the need to overhaul the security model. Indeed, Vista has proven to be a generally more secure operating system, though some vulnerabilities that apply to ordinary software impact Vista users just as much as any other. But now, software analysts testing the latest build 3205 of the beta for Windows XP Service Pack 3 are discovering a wealth of genuinely new features - not just patches and security updates (although there are literally over a thousand of those), but services that could substantially improve system security without overhauling the kernel like in Vista."
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