A Brief History of Ugly: Apple in the Last 10 Years

"In horror honor of yesterday's announcement of the newly-designed third-generation iPod nano, we here at Infinite Loop have taken some time to look back at the last 10 years of Apple product design in order to get some perspective on just how hideous the new Apple audio player is (to some of us). This list isn't to say that some of these Apple monstrosities don't have a special place in our heart, though."

KDE 4.0 Beta 2 Released

"The KDE Community proudly presents the second Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the feature freeze and the stabilization of the current codebase. Simultaneously the KOffice developers have released their third Alpha release, marking significant improvements in this innovative office suite. Both KDE and KOffice have benefited from the Google Summer of Code, as most resulting code has now been merged."

OpenSUSE 10.3 Beta 3 Released

Christoph Thiel annouced the release of openSUSE 10.3 Beta 3. "It's my pleasure to announce the availability of openSUSE 10.3 Beta3. This is the last beta release before entering RC phase in two weeks. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release of openSUSE! Important changes since Beta2: Linux kernel 2.6.22.5, libzypp 3.22.1; improved package lists of the 1-CD GNOME and KDE editions; countless bug fixes in every component; reworked concept of language bundles."

EasyBCD 1.7 Released

EasyBCD, the freeware tool used for dual-booting Windows Vista with Linux, BSD, OS X, and Unix (using Vista's own bootloader), has been updated to version 1.7. This new release of EasyBCD features a rewritten NeoGrub for installing and managing GRUB from within Windows and a new feature dubbed 'GRUB-less Linux' which searches the drive for Linux and boots into it, regardless of whether or not GRUB is installed. My take: A great tool for Vista users. I use it to manage various installations on my laptop, and it has never let me down.

Mandriva Linux 2008 Release Candidate 1 Released

The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Copernic, is now available. The release notes are available here. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate) is available here, and the detailed technical specifications are available here. This release candidate is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. A One combined live/install CD edition will be released in the near future (problems with unionfs prevented the One edition from being release at the same time as the other editions).

AMD To Open up Graphics Specifications

LWN.net writes: "A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and 'that is better for everybody'. Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come."

Comprehensive Linux Terminal Speed Comparison

"Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don’t want the console output to be the limiting factor. I took the burden on me to do a comprehensive comparison of the text through of all possible terminals."

Palm Cancels the Foleo

Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm's next-generation (Linux-based too) smartphone platform. My Take: A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device.

ISO Rejects OOXML for ‘Fast-Track Procedure’

Microsoft has failed in its attempt to have its Office Open XML document format fast-tracked straight to the status of an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization. The proposal must now be revised to take into account the negative comments made during the voting process. Microsoft expects that a second vote early next year will result in approval, it said Tuesday. That is by no means certain, however, given the objections raised by some national standards bodies.

Continuing Dual-Licensing Discussions

Discussion continues on the Linux Kernel mailing list about the legality and morality of re-licensing BSD/GPL dual-licensed code under only the GPL. Alan Cox replied to Theo de Raadt's comments suggesting he was encouraging people to break the law, "re-read my email and then apologize. I do question the .h files where they are BSD licence and no changes were made to the work. I also point out that the dual licence on that code appears to give permission to distribute under one of those licences by choice." In response to Theo's request that code be shared both ways rather than converted to a sole GPL, "that's about the first thing I would agree on - its somewhat rude and not something I personally would usually choose to do."

NetBSD 4.0 RC1 Released

The NetBSD Release Engineering Team announced the release of NetBSD 4.0 RC1 today. The release candidate is directly available from the project's FTP server. A list of significant changes and features can be found here. "The NetBSD4.0 release provides numerous significant functional enhancements, including support for many new devices, integration of hundreds of bug fixes, new and updated kernel subsystems, and many user-land enhancements. The result of these improvements is a stable operating system fit for production use that rivals most commercially available systems."

Review: KDE 4.0 Beta 2

Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0 Beta 2, and concludes: "This beta may not be the end result yet, but there has definitely been a lot of progress since the last one. For the first time I have been able to stop writing about individual features within KDE 4 and start to talk about the level of integration, and general feel of the system to get an impression of how KDE 4.0 will feel like to use."

Sun: ‘OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux’

Sun seeks to apply the lessons of Linux and turn open source Solaris into an operating system to rival Linux and to be as commonly used as Java. Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. In addition, Sun released Update 4 for Solaris 10 (also called Solaris 08/07), introducing a major enhancement in its OS virtualization technology called Solaris Containers.