OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

The Perfect Setup – OpenVZ with CentOS 4.4

Submitted by falko 2006-11-12 OS News 2 Comments

"In this howto I will describe how to prepare a CentOS 4.4 server for OpenVZ virtual machines. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers."

Introduction to PHP for IBM i5/OS

Submitted by anonymous 2006-11-12 IBM 8 Comments

This course first presents an overview of what PHP is, how PHP programs run, and why PHP is so popular. You will also see a comparison of PHP to JavaScript, CGI, Net.Data and Java Web applications. Next, you will see how the PHP language is supported on the System IBM i5/OS platform with the Zend Corporation product suite.

Relevant Linux Support Patches, Documentation for PS3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-11-12 Games 35 Comments

"Power Developer is pleased to provide the relevant Linux support patches and documentation for running Linux on the Sony PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 games console was released in Japan today and will go on sale in the US market on Friday, 17th November."

Slides from Mono’s Meeting

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-12 Mono 3 Comments

There was an official Mono Meeting Day a few days ago and now Novell has published their slides online in PDF form. Scheduling of upcoming versions of Mono are discussed among others.

Vista vs. Leopard; Tablet Tech, Cracking on Vista

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-12 Windows 52 Comments

"At its recent WWDC, Apple sought to steal some of Microsoft's thunder by releasing just enough details of its next OS, Leopard, to make an early comparison to the forthcoming Windows Vista possible. Staying true to form, then. More here. Also, Vista's dual Mode support allows resistive devices, such as touch screens and electromagnetic devices, to work with any computer that uses a digital tablet. Finally, Vista has already hit the pirate boards, along with an activation hack.

GNUstep: A Free Software Alternative to OpenStep

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-12 OpenStep, GNUstep 48 Comments

The popularity of OS X among geeks in recent years has led to a lot more people discovering OpenStep through Cocoa. GNUstep provides a much-needed Free Software alternative, as David Chisnall explains.

The QObject Class in Qt4

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-12 Qt 6 Comments

An important class to become familiar with is the one from which all Qt Widgets are derived: QObject. In this chapter, the authors discuss the QObject class in Qt4.

Submitted by Charles A Landemaine 2006-11-12 PC-BSD 17 Comments

"I've been using PC-BSD for approx. 10 Months so I've had enough time to see what life throws at me with it. My first install was 1.0 Release Canadate 1 and I currently run PC-BSD 1.2 (the current release) on my laptop and have a beta version of 1.3 installed on my desktop for testing. This will cover PC-BSD 1.2 and PC-BSD in general. PC-BSD is primarly for desktops but makes a darn good laptop/workstation system." More here.

Camera Phone Used to Shoot Professional Music Video Clip

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-11 Wireless 17 Comments

Rob Dickinson, former band leader of "The Catherine Wheel" (and cousin of Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson), has shot the video clip of his new single, "Oceans" (iTunes), using a Nokia N93 cellphone. The Symbian-based smartphone has a 3.2MP camera that is capable of capturing VGA video at 30fps with its Carl Zeiss optics. You can view the video at Yahoo!'s Music site (with IE) or via VLC. When the N93 was first launched Nokia tried to market the phone as the first DVD-quality capture phone in the market, but this is the first time that such a device is used for serious, professional purposes.

Submitted by Governa 2006-11-11 Windows 46 Comments

Outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin posted a blog entry Friday apologizing for the confusion surrounding comments he made to reporters Wednesday about being so confident in Windows Vista's security that his seven-year-old son's PC had no antivirus software installed. Allchin acknowledged Friday that he wasn't as clear as he intended to be, saying he never meant to imply that Windows Vista does not need antivirus software, despite citing the example of his son's PC. "It's important for me that our customers are using the appropriate security solutions for the right situations, whether that's security functionality integrated in the operating systems, or add-on products," he said.

Submitted by deanlinkous 2006-11-11 Open Source 30 Comments

"The Software Freedom Law Center's CTO Bradley Kuhn has issued a statement regarding the Novell-Microsoft agreements and how they will impact FOSS developers. They have analyzed in particular Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers and see little value and in fact say it's worse than useless, because it creates an illusion of safety and because it limits severely what that developer is allowed to do with his work."

FreeBSD Security Event Auditing

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-11-11 FreeBSD 5 Comments

The upcoming release of FreeBSD 6.2 includes the new Security Event Auditing system, that "permits the selective and fine-grained logging of security-relevant system events for the purposes of post-mortem analysis, intrusion detection, and run-time monitoring analysis." Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Robert Watson, founder of the TrustedBSD project, and discussed the advantages and potential it brings. Elsewhere, SCTP has been added to FreeBSD. Stream Control Transmission Protocol is a reliable message oriented transport protocol which provides network fault tolerance.

Submitted by Eugenia Loli 2006-11-11 Java 21 Comments

Java SE 6.0 (JDK/JRE) Release Candidate is now available. You can see the technology highlights of Java SE 6.0 in the release notes. Make sure that you also read the readme file. This Sun release supports Solaris, Windows and Linux. The documentation can be found here. You can find the main Java SE 6.0 page here. Note the sources are as usual available.

Dynamic XForms with JavaScript, DOM

Submitted by IdaAshley 2006-11-11 General Development 2 Comments

XForms is an ideal open standards technology for collecting and submitting data from a wide variety of Web-capable platforms. Using JavaScript to edit the DOM with XForms allows a single form to accommodate multiple, site-unique submission requirements.

Submitted by mcduck 2006-11-10 Microsoft 31 Comments

Microsoft has released Office 2007 on it's Microsoft Volume License Services website. Confirmed versions available for download are the Office 2007 Enterprise at 559MB and Office 2007 Groove at 189MB. MSDN subscribers can expect to get it on November 12th. Office 2007 went gold on November 6th 2006.

How GPLv3 Tackles License Proliferation

Submitted by anonymous 2006-11-10 Open Source 26 Comments

This guest column by a representative of the Free Software Foundation Europe discusses proposed provisions in a future version 3 of the GNU General Public License that are intended to reduce open-source license proliferation, by making the GPL more flexible.

ATI Offers DirectX – OpenGL Converter

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-10 3D 27 Comments

Graphics chip maker ATI Technologies has released HLSL2GLSL, an open source application designed to help programmers convert graphics code optimized for Windows’ DirectX 9 Application Programming Interface to OpenGL, which is used on the Mac. Binaries for Mac OS X and Windows are available for download.

OpenSUSE 10.2 Beta 2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-11-10 SuSE, openSUSE 87 Comments

OpenSUSE 10.2 Beta 2 has been released. "I'm glad to announce the second beta of openSUSE 10.2 codename Basilisk Lizard. It contains a large number of enhancements and updates done by the open source community and Novell's development teams. For Beta 2 we updated to OpenSync 0.20 and would ask for some testing by the community. We have prepared some testcases for specific mobile devices, like mobile phones which synchronize with SyncML, IrMC and other protocols. The testcases also include simple connection tests for Palm Devices. We would really appreciate any help and hopefully many success reports."

NetBSD Live! 2007 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-11-10 NetBSD 20 Comments

The NetBSD project has released a live CD with automatic hardware detection and an option to boot into KDE. Called NetBSD Live! 2007, the CD image is available for the i386 platform: "This CD-ROM contains a specially constructed version of NetBSD 4.0_BETA sporting a modified kernel based on NetBSD-CURRENT. Booting is done using an adapted version of the GRUB boot loader. The CD contains the following software packages in addition to the base operating system files: XFree86, KDE 3.4.5 with multiple language sets; joe and kvim text editors; AbiWord word processor, Dia 0.9.4 flow-charting and diagramming application, Inkscape 0.4.2 vector graphic application; The GIMP 2.2; Firefox web browser, and more." See the release notes for more information.

Apple Strengthens Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with New Build

Thom Holwerda 2006-11-10 macOS 22 Comments

Apple this week delivered to developers Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A303, the latest in an extremely limited series of pre-release builds of its next-generation operating system. People familiar with the new distribution of the software, labeled Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A303, say one of its primary objectives of the release is to knock out several 'performance related bugs' that were present in 9A283.