OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

New Linux-Ready Firmware Developer Kit Project

Submitted by diegocg 2006-09-14 Linux 2 Comments

Arjan van de Ven, an Intel employee and a known kernel hacker, has announced a new OSS project, the Linux-ready firmware developer kit, a "tool to test how well Linux works together with the firmware (BIOS) of your machine." In other words, a sort of 'Linux-compatible machine' test. There are screenshots as well.

A New Screen of Death for Mac OS X

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 macOS 60 Comments

Contrary to popular belief, Mac OS X does have a 'blue screen of death', only it's grey instead of blue, and it's called the kernel panic screen, and it sure does scare the pajeezers out of you if you just bought a Mac (sadly, I can know), and it has had this screen since 10.2; before that, the error information was spilled as raw data straight on the screen. Amit Singh writes about the history and workings of this kernel panic screen, and provides methods of modifying it, or turning it into the 'raw data baby' version. And yes, you can even make it look exactly like the real BSOD. Die-hard Windowfying OS X, this.

‘Dell 2.0’ To Focus on Customer Satisfaction

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 Hardware 22 Comments

Computer manufacturer Dell is to focus on customer satisfaction, which it admitted on Wednesday it "had not done perfectly in the past". The company is investing USD 150m in customer relationships this year, said chairman Michael Dell in New York on Tuesday. He hopes the business plan, called Dell 2.0, will reverse the flagging fortunes of the biggest computer maker in the world. Recent woes have included a poor quarterly earnings report and exploding laptop batteries.

Don Syme: Introduction to F#

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 General Development 21 Comments

Mike Hall caught up with Don Syme recently and recorded a few interviews covering Don's favorite programming language: F#. Don has done many great things over there in MSR Cambridge including creating everybody's favorite C# feature, Generics. Well, he also developed (with his team) the research programming language, F#. "F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system."

Office 2007 Beta 2 TR Adds UI, Performance Improvements

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 Microsoft 12 Comments

Microsoft's Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh introduces performance enhancements as well as user interface tweaks - most notably, more intuitive ways to work with the new Office ribbon. For example, users who are tired of Office 2007's two color schemes - black and default blue - will applaud the suite's new silver theme, accessible regardless of the operating system used. And, while we've found some Office 2007 applications, including Outlook, to be sluggish, the performance improvements in the refresh were obvious. There's a slideshow too, whiloe PCMag also reports on this new release.

OLPC Screen Is Clever, But Very Odd

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 Hardware 8 Comments

"When I first heard about the LCD used in the OLPC project, I was equally intrigued and sceptical. The claimed specifications put it, on paper, well into the league of the best panels available and, if manufactured using conventional technology, would present a major step forward in LCDs, which you would expect to carry a significant price premium."

Submitted by mikemuch 2006-09-13 Windows 27 Comments

Now that Microsoft has issued the first release canditate of Vista to testers, ExtremeTech has decided to build its own high-performance Vista machine. The article details component choices that will make for a machine that can attain a 'Windows Experience Score' of over 5. The build parts total over USD 2500, so fast Vista performance won't come cheap.

AROS: Onboard the Last Train to Amiga Neverland

Guest post by Dmitar Butrovski 2006-09-13 Amiga & AROS 25 Comments

It was 1997 and in these dark ages of the Amiga history, a few brave ones have embarked on a seemingly impossible journey. It is difficult to start from a clean slab, but complete rewrite of the AmigaOS Application Programming Interface (API), in open source domain, was the only option for Amiga community to gain control over destiny of the beloved platform. The Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) was born. Under, at times slow but steadfast progress, the vision is nearly complete. Not only is AROS almost feature-for-feature complete when compared to AmigaOS 3.x, but it has excelled many of the original design specifications.

8-Core Mac Pro

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 Apple 26 Comments

"Codenamed Kenstfield (Core 2) and Clovertown (Xeon), Intel's new quad-core processors will dramatically increase the amount of processing power you can have in a single system. Given that the Mac Pro features two LGA-771 sockets, you could theoretically drop two Clovertown processors in there and you'd have an 8-core Mac Pro. Without a doubt Apple will release a quad-core version of the Mac Pro, either by the end of this year or early next year, but are users who buy the Mac Pro today missing out? While we're still a couple of months away from being able to test a retail Clovertown CPU in the Mac Pro, we wanted to see if the current engineering samples of the chip would work."

Troika Releases Details on New AmigaOS4 Board

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 Amiga & AROS 13 Comments

A lot of hardware-related news today, but this one will probably mean the most to us alternative OS fans: it seems AmigaOS 4 has found hardware to actually run on. The board will have an IBM 750GL at 800 MHz with 1MB of L2 cache, and will support processors up to 1Ghz. Also: "One of the biggest changes to the Amy05 design from our first released specification is the addition of the AMD Geode CS5536 companion device. For Project Prometheus/Amy'05 this becomes Amy’s Southbridge." The current board is is a development board, and will be made available in a limited quantity for hardware testing/OS4 development.

Cell-Based Computer Breaks Out of IBM

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 IBM 16 Comments

IBM has finally, finally, started shipping computers based on the Cell architecture it co-developed with Sony and Toshiba. In fact, the company claims, a number of high profile clients such as the University of Manchester and the Fraunhofer Institute are already running the much ballyhooed devices. Cnet has more.

Sun Upgrades Low-End Servers

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 Oracle and SUN 4 Comments

Sun Microsystems has upgraded its low-end UltraSparc-based servers with faster 1.5GHz UltraSparc IIIi processors, the company said Wednesday. The move has been expected since August, when Sun said it scrapped its UltraSparc IIIi+ 'Serrano' processor and planned to upgrade the IIIi instead. The new chips are a notch faster than their 1.35GHz predecessors.

Submitted by Valour 2006-09-13 Hardware 21 Comments

VIA Technologies announced this morning that the company's new C7-D processor is now available. That wouldn't seem like such a big deal if it weren't for the fact that VIA has also taken the initiative to make this the world's first carbon-free desktop CPU.

OpenSolaris BrandZ Integrated

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-13 Solaris 33 Comments

BrandZ, which, quoting from the OpenSolaris BrandZ Community webpage, is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments, integrated into the OpenSolaris mainline OpenSolaris mainline kernel last night.

Submitted by superstoned 2006-09-13 KDE 84 Comments

This article is about KDE's memory usage, but there are comparisons with other solutions for your desktop. Lubos Lunak concludes there is still work to do and there is some lowhanging fruit, but KDE does already a nice job on keeping its memory usage low.

Introduction to TUD:OS

Guest post by Michael Voigt 2006-09-12 OS News 4 Comments

If you are in Germany, the country of Sauerkraut and Beethoven, and you move far to the east, you might arrive at the town of Dresden. In this city, the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is located, which’s operating systems group has developed a C++ implementation of Jochen Liedtkes well-known L4 µ-kernel interface. This microkernel, ironically called Fiasco, is the center of all the different projects of the TU Dresden Operating System (TUD:OS) research group.

Microsoft Posts a New Longhorn Server Build

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-12 Windows 16 Comments

The August Community Technology Preview build of Longhorn Server is available for download. It's still not an RC1, but it does include performance, reliability and UI changes, according to Microsoft. On a related note, The Inq reviewed Vista RC1, and concludes "Vista's still a mess." And that's not all: Microsoft is worried that the EU might interfere with Vista's security plans.

Submitted by Saad 2006-09-12 Apple 13 Comments

"One of the less well known Mac clones, the MaxxBoxx was released in Germany in July 1997 to fill the needs of users with very demanding applications. In a stunning enclosure, the MaxxBoxx was easy to open and upgrade. The machine was built into a cube that was twice as wide as an ordinary mini tower with room for up to ten drives." There's more on old Macs: Sonnet has announced new CPU upgrades for G4 PowerMacs and Xserves.

Submitted by Tyr. 2006-09-12 Windows 38 Comments

"Any computer user that's owned and installed software onto their computer knows that the more you install, the slower the beast runs. Most also know that it's not just quantity and that what you install plays a large factor in how slowly your computer runs. The aim of this article is to find out what types of application slow down a computer the most. I'm going to be measuring the 'speed' as the time it takes to shutdown, restart and get back to desktop (with auto-login) and start an application in the computer's start-up settings."

Improve Mashup Data Cache Performance with pureXML

Submitted by anonymous 2006-09-12 General Development No Comments

Part 1 of this series discussed a mashup application, which begins to draw data from several services and combines it. Now we will discuss how to save mashup request results to a DB2 9 database, plus take some of the load off of those external services and improve performance dramatically with pureXML.