OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

IndieHIG Aims to Update Apple’s HIG

Submitted by bababooie 2006-12-22 macOS 29 Comments

"The IndieHIG Wiki is a place where developers and UI designers can come together to create a new set of Human Interface Guidelines to supplement Apple's guidelines. Apple has neglected to update their HIG with modern UI designs and controls, so developers have been forced to replicate these UI elements on their own to keep their applications from looking dated. Since each developer has slightly different implementations of these elements, it has resulted in a fairly inconsistent look and feel for Mac OS users." Meanwhile, for the first time in over three months, Apple is asking its developer community to begin testing and providing feedback on a forthcoming update to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Submitted by Francis Kuntz 2006-12-22 Apple 22 Comments

"I have tested, and continue to run in a production setting, two instances of Windows 2003 Server hosted by Parallels Desktop, running on OS X Server 10.4.8 on a 3 GHz Xserve. To skip to the punch line, it works, and it's as fast as all get-out. Parallels does not stretch the truth when it claims near-native performance; Xserve is capable of knocking off any two-socket Netburst (Pentium 4) Xeon server going back at least two years. Compared to Xserve, those Intel boxes eat more electricity and give off more heat than they give back in capacity for work."

Submitted by brewin 2006-12-22 In the News 51 Comments

Hans Reiser, the prominent Bay Area Linux programmer charged with murdering his wife, says he's seeking to sell off his open-source file system company, Namesys, to help pay mounting legal costs. In the first interview since his arrest, Reiser spoke this week about the future of his company and his legal travails from within the walls of Santa Rita Jail, where he is being held without bail.

Microsoft Coughs up Vista APIs

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-22 Windows 30 Comments

Microsoft has released a first draft of programming interfaces meant to help security firms create products that work with kernel protection features in Windows Vista. The new application programming interfaces, or APIs, will let software makers extend the functionality of the Windows kernel in 64-bit versions of Vista, Microsoft said on its website on Tuesday. Security companies, including market leaders Symantec and McAfee, had complained that Microsoft locked them out of the kernel.

HTC’s UMPC-like Device Revealed

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-21 Wireless 30 Comments

HTC's eagerly anticipated entry into the ultra-mobile PC market has made an early, unscheduled appearance on the web, adding weight to the company's own admission that it could release a UMPC-like product as early as 2007. Mobile-Review has more photos of the device. Don't tell me you don't (secretly) want one.

Access z/OS Batch Jobs from Java

Submitted by anonymous 2006-12-21 Java No Comments

Java can provide a simple way to submit z/OS batch jobs to run -- but that is just the beginning. You can also use Java, from any platform, to check on the status of your z/OS batch jobs. This article showes you how to use Java to access z/OS JES Sysout files. In addition, extending the Commons Net Library allows the specific JES file attributes to be encapsulated in Java objects.

Jeremy Allison Resigns from Novell in Protest of Patent Deal

Submitted by John Mills 2006-12-21 Novell and Ximian 85 Comments

Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls 'a mistake' which will be 'damaging to Novell's success in the future'. His main issue with the deal, though, is "that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence, it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally." He leaves the company at the end of this month.

GNOME 2.17.4 Released

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2006-12-21 Gnome 17 Comments

GNOME 2.17.4 has been released. "This is our second development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. New features are coming in at a nice rate, and that's great. A lot of bug fixes too. And some crashers are appearing here and there: that's the fun of unstable releases!"

Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-21 Wayland 275 Comments

In 2002, both KDE and GNOME released their last major revisions; KDE released KDE 3.0 on 3rd April, while GNOME followed shortly after with GNOME 2.0 on 27th June. For the Linux desktop, therefore, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continiously been fed point releases which added bits of functionaility and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What's going on?

Submitted by nedvis 2006-12-21 SuSE, openSUSE 29 Comments

In the seven weeks since Microsoft and Novell announced their controversial interoperability and patent protection agreement, Redmond has handed out some 16000 subscription certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Redmond is also trumpeting the fact that several of its existing enterprise customers - such as Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies - are among the first to take advantage of these certificates and the interoperability between Windows Server and SUSE Linux.

Submitted by deanlinkous 2006-12-21 Linux 34 Comments

"Irish Free Software developers Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley have developed a new distribution, appropriately named gNewSense. Made with the philosophy of Debian and the structure of Ubuntu, it aims to be the freest distribution out there. It's so 'free', that it earned an official endorsement from the Free Software Foundation. Linux Online is grateful to Messrs. Brazil and O'Malley for taking time out of their busy schedules to answer a few questions about their project."

eSATA: Faster External Drives to Arrive

Submitted by Matt Johnson 2006-12-21 Hardware 21 Comments

eSATA, an external version of the technology that's used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives. Great for storing photos, video and music.

Submitted by Valour 2006-12-21 Internet 52 Comments

BSD and Linux programmers have had a lot of success in creating drivers for new computer hardware in a timely manner, but much of their effort has been without the support of major hardware manufacturers. Intel, Marvell, Texas Instruments and Broadcom, though separate and competing entities, seem by one consent to prevent non-Microsoft operating systems from working properly with some of their most widely-used network chips.

Submitted by mkools 2006-12-20 Oracle and SUN 58 Comments

Project Looking Glass has hit the magical 1.0 mark: "This release is the culmination of 3 years of work, starting with Hideya san who originally conceived of a bold, new type of window system, through the initial shake down of the proof-of-concept demo by an internal Sun community, followed by the open sourcing of the technology, which generated such enormous interest that it brought down the java.net servers several times. From that point on many people from around the globe have contributed to the project; contributing to the core, contributing applications, performing testing, writing and translating documentation, etc. The project owners (Hideya, Paul, Krishna and myself) are very grateful for all of the great contributions we have received from you, the LG community."

Windows Vista and Protection from Malware

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Windows 43 Comments

"On November 30, Sophos issued its monthly report on the top ten threats reported to them in November of 2006. As a part of this, Sophos also studied Vista's vulnerability to these malware threats. I found the information and press discussion confusing, so I thought I would clarify what this really means for customers. In order to understand what was really going on here, I asked the team to go look at the technical facts behind the story, and that started in the lab. We began by observing first-hand how these various forms of malware affect a Vista system using a machine that was configured with the default settings and without any additional security software. What we found was that if you are using only the software in Vista (e.g., Windows Mail and no add-on security software), then you are immune to all ten of the malware threats that Sophos cited."

Outlook 2007: Linux and Open Source

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Linux 15 Comments

"In the year to come, we expect to see Linux maintain its torrid development pace, with major new enterprise releases from Red Hat, which is set to ship RHEL 5 in January, and Novell, which will also ship an update to its Open Enterprise Server early next year. What's more, we expect to see one or two new releases from each of the all-free leading-edge distributions we track - including Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE - alongwith new developments from the swelling horde of smaller Linux flavors, inboth commercial and noncommercial quarters."

Mozilla Issues Security Updates

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Mozilla, Gecko 16 Comments

The Mozilla Foundation has issued 'critical' security updates tovulnerabilities discovered in the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mailclient and SeaMonkey application suite. Flaws were found in versions of theopen-source software prior to both Firefox 2.0.0.1 and Firefox 1.5.0.9, aswell as prior to Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.0.7, Mozilla saidTuesday.

Citrix Snags Embedded OS Provider Ardence

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 OS News No Comments

Citrix Systems on Dec. 20 will put another piece of its Dynamic DesktopInitiative into place when it announces its plannedacquisition of Ardence. Ardence, a privately held company that marketsembedded real-time operating system software and a software streamingplatform for Windows and Linux, brings to the table real-time provisioningmanagement for operating systems.

What’s Next for AMD?

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 AMD 6 Comments

"In a series of announcements and conference calls, culminating in a recentanalyst meeting, AMD has been slowly revealing pieces of the big pictureregarding where they plan to take their platforms in the coming years. I'vebeen following the coverage, and I've put togethera synthesis of it below."

New Leopard Screenshots

Submitted by Arcenius 2006-12-20 macOS 25 Comments

Not too long ago Apple released a new build of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, to select testers. AeroXP now has some screenshots of this new build. They report, for one thing, that even though it is available, ZFS is not actually working in this build. Update: ThinkSecret has more screenshots and an overview.