VMware Player Now Runs Para-Virtualized Linux

  Submitted by Alessandro Perilli OS News 14 Comments
At the last USENIX VMware and XenSource finally agreed to work on a joint project for hypervisor standardization, coordinated by Rusty Russell, Linux kernel hacker working for IBM Linux Technology Center, and called paravirt-ops. But VMware doesn't want to give up its own standardization implementation, VMI, and today released by surprise a working version of its Player able to run para-virtualized Linux distributions over a VMI compliant engine.
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Apple’s Folly: the eWorld Online Service

  Submitted by Saad Apple 9 Comments
"Back in the mid-nineties, Apple was a company without focus. After the explosive growth of the Macintosh in the late eighties, Apple was flush with cash, but had little strategy to guide its investments. As a result, products like eWorld were developed while Apple's core products languished. Meant as a substitute to the very expensive AppleLink online service, eWorld was based on the AOL network, and presented a friendly face to several proprietary online services and limited internet connectivity. eWorld failed to gain much of a foothold in the market, and was quietly discontinued in 1996 (only months before CEO Michael Spindler, was ousted)."
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Mozilla Updates Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey

  Submitted by george Mozilla, Gecko 34 Comments
The Mozilla Corporation today issued small updates for its popular Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail applications, primarily targeting security problems. The updates take both products to version 1.5.0.7, and were issued via the vendor's automatic update system this morning, Australia-time. The less popular SeaMonkey mail and browsing suite was also updated to version 1.0.5. Update: DesktopLinux has a detailed explanation on the changelog. Also, Camino 1.0.3 of OSX was released.
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Top Ten Requests for Future iPod Games

Games 38 Comments
For the 5th+ iPod generation Apple has just introduced downloadable games and so far they offer 9 games for $4.99 each. Looking back in the classic era of computer gaming we remember some real gems that would fit right into the "keep it simple stupid" philosophy of the iPod. So, let's have some fun and suggest 10 classic games that would specifically work well with the iPod scroll wheel interface.
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How Colour-Blind People See Your UIs

Graphics 32 Comments
"The color blindness is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish. According to the medical studies, eight to ten percent of male population suffers from some kind of color blindness (figure for female population is much lower). What does it mean to the average Swing developer? Well, if you rely too much on color differences, you may be not conveying the information as well as you thought. Now you can run your application in debug UI mode and have a live preview of your UI as viewed by the color-blind population."
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Microsoft’s Zune Launched

Microsoft 87 Comments
Usually, we do not report on .mp3 players. However, sometimes we cannot go around them. Today is one of those times: Microsoft has launched its supposed iPod killer, the Zune. "Not a lot of surprises in the specs department, but they've confirmed the basics we've known for a while, like WiFi, 30GB of HDD, built-in FM, a 3-inch screen and the basic music, pictures and video playback. They also finally let slip the screen res - an unsurprising QVGA - and some better news on the codec front: the Zune supports h.264, MP3, AAC and WMA."
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KDE 4 ‘Krash’ Packages on Mac OS X, openSUSE, Kubuntu

  Submitted by Smirnoff KDE 28 Comments
Packages for the first KDE 4 developers snapshot "Krash" have started appearing. Most exciting is packages for a whole new platform, Mac OS X. More details are on Benjamin Reed's blog. For the traditionalists packages are available from openSUSE and Kubuntu. If you are a KDE application developer, this is the easiest way to start porting your application to KDE 4. Meanwhile work is continuing on KDE on Windows where developers have successfully got all of kdelibs compiling. Finally the KDE Women project has a new tutorial to get you started in KDE4 development.
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ZETA’s Multiuser Previewed

  Submitted by sogabe Zeta 26 Comments
IsComputerOn.com takes a first look at the ZETA's multiuser capabilities currently under development. This is "a first beta, usable but still incomplete and with bugs" reports ICO. The article uses screenshots to show what multiuser looks like in ZETA, and describes how to create user accounts, as well as some of the existing problems with the implementation which, hopefully, will be fixed before release. As Magnussoft told us a few days ago, multiuser support will be available as an update to the upcoming ZETA 1.21, but no release date is mentioned.
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What Apple Can Do to Trump Vista

  Submitted by Sonia Mehta Apple 72 Comments
"I want Vista to be a better OS than it's been promoted to be, but at the same time, I also want OS X to finally receive the public adoption that it deserves. Now is the time for Apple to creatively promote its Macintosh platform with OS X. This is the critical hour, and if Apple is able to take advantage of the uneasy feeling that many have towards Vista, then they could attract an untold amount of new users."
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Automatix: Making Installation a Snap in Ubuntu

  Submitted by Mack Johnson Ubuntu 21 Comments
MadPenguin takes a short look at Automatix, and concludes: "While we would use Automatix on a regular basis, we think this utility is taking new steps into a much needed territory. In the ease of today's latest program managers, we still run into those that still can’t seem to use these simple package installation solutions. With any luck, endeavors such as Automatix will help to address this need, and once again prove just how far desktop Linux has actually come."
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NFSv4 Delivers Seamless Network Access

  Submitted by IdaAshley Internet 8 Comments
Network File System has been part of the world of free operating systems and proprietary UNIX flavors since the mid-1980s. But not all administrators know how it works or why there have been new releases. It is important to know about NFS simply because the system is vital for seamless access across UNIX networks. Learn how the latest release of NFS, NFSv4, has addressed many criticisms, particularly with regard to security problems, that became apparent in versions 2 and 3.
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