OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Sysjail 1.0 Released

Submitted by Ancestor 2006-08-25 BSD & Darwin 1 Comment

"Sysjail is a userland virtualisation system for OSs supporting the systrace library. It runs on OpenBSD, NetBSD and MirOS. The first generation of sysjail is as close to a drop-in replacement for FreeBSD's jail subsystem as reasonably possible. While sysjail currently behaves as a NetBSD/OpenBSD/MirOS implementation of jail, it also provides additonal auditing and resource-limiting utilities."

Submitted by Saad 2006-08-25 Legal 18 Comments

When Mac sales dropped off in 1985, Bill Gates personally wrote John Sculley suggesting that he license the Macintosh design to companies like Apollo, DEC and Wang, and establish the software as the industry standard. Apple declined, and Microsoft published Windows. Sculley was enraged, and eventually filed suit. After five years, Apple lost, but not before severely damaging its relationship with Microsoft (which accounted for 2/3 of all Mac software sales).

Slackware 11.0 RC3 Released

Submitted by Tyler Longren 2006-08-25 Slackware, Slax 9 Comments

Release Candidate 3 of Slackware 11.0 has been released. Patrick says this will most likely be the last RC but he won't rule out an RC4. One important thing in this release: kernel 2.6 has been moved out of /testing and placed into /extra. From the changelog: "Here is Slackware 11.0 release candidate 3. I think most of the irresistible upgrades are in here now, and the bug reports have been mostly handled."

Flexible ARM9 SBC Boots Linux in 1.69 Seconds

Submitted by anonymous 2006-08-25 Debian 7 Comments

Technologic Systems is offering a freely downloadable, Debian-based Linux OS image said to boot from an SD card in less than two seconds, on the company's ARM9-based SBC (single-board computer). The TS-7300 SBC targets embedded applications requiring "extreme design security, flexibility, and reliability", according to the company.

Submitted by anyweb 2006-08-25 SuSE, openSUSE 41 Comments

Linux-Noob has reviewed SLED 10. "Novell's strengths are many, and I'm delighted to see the excellent work they have done in usability tests, and making the whole desktop feel like it's ready, ready to do business, and ready to serve its users. The development they've done with Beagle and in particular the 'computer menu' are fantastic and hopefully are just the start of better things to come."

T2 SDE 6.0.0 Released

Submitted by René Rebe 2006-08-25 Linux 15 Comments

T2 SDE 6.0.0 has been released with various prebuilt .iso images for AMD64, i386, PPC, PPC64, and SPARC64. The various architectures include support for Intel Macs as well as Sun's T1 Niagara CPU, and ship with Xorg 7.0, GCC 4.1.1, KDE 3.5.4, GNOME 2.14.3, and much more. T2 SDE is not just a common Linux distribution - it is a flexible open source System Development Environment. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions. Currently the Linux kernel is used - but they are expanding to MINIX, Hurd, OpenDarwin, and OpenBSD.

Submitted by Ralf. 2006-08-25 Windows 17 Comments

The web exploded yesterday with the news that Microsoft would cripple 32bit versions of Vista so they would not play protected high-definition content. However, Microsoft was quick to respond, stating: "The community is buzzing with reactions to APC Magazine's article regarding playback of protected High Definition content in 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. However, the information shared was incorrect and the reactions pervading the community are thus (understandably) ill-informed. The real deal is that no version of Windows Vista will make a determination as to whether any given piece of content should play back or not."

‘Cipherfunk Shutdown by GPL Police’

Submitted by anonymous 2006-08-25 Open Source 114 Comments

"The cipherfunk web site, which made extra packages available to Ubuntu and MEPIS users, was shut down in response to complaints from Ubuntu team members Matthew Garrett and Philipp Kern. It is my understanding they alleged that cipherfunk was not making modified GPLed source code available in a timely fashion. You can read about it the website." "Well, the GNU GPL states as part of Section 3 of the licence that I must provide source code on request for no more than the cost of physically performing the distribution. Given that the host this box is on actually costs me 110.95AUD every 30 days to run, 9.90AUD, as nice as that is - still will cost me over 100AUD to distribute the code at all." Update: As Matthew Garret pointed out in the comments, he wrote his side of the story on his blog.

Sartoris Microkernel Tutorial

Submitted by Santiago Bazerque 2006-08-25 OS News 2 Comments

"What follows is meant to be a hands-on introduction to system programming, using C and the Sartoris microkernel. Knowledge of the C programming language is assumed. This tutorial should have you writing, compiling and booting several little programs presto. In order to do this, you will need access to a *nix system and development tools. Linux is what we use over here, but if you are a windows user, Cygwin will do as well."

What is SLI Ready Memory?

Submitted by anonymous 2006-08-25 Hardware 3 Comments

Also known as 'EPP', SLI Ready memory is something new to memory design. It is JEDEC certified and can be thought of as a continuation of your memory's SPD profile. Using EPP you can overclock your memory, create performance profiles, and dynamically set timings and voltages.

uBASIC – a Really Tiny BASIC Interpreter

Submitted by anonymous 2006-08-25 General Development 12 Comments

Adam Dunkels, well-known author of the Contiki operating system and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, has written a really small BASIC interpreter called uBASIC in about 700 lines of C code. It is intended to be a very small scripting language for systems where memory really is at a premium such as deeply embedded systems which may have as little as a few hundreds of bytes of RAM. It provides an interesting look into how to write a very lightweight script interpreter.

Guest post by Kroc 2006-08-24 OS News 44 Comments

GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note: After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

Internet Explorer 7 Hits RC1 Milestone

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-24 Internet Explorer 32 Comments

Microsoft is releasing for public download on Aug. 24 a new test build of its browser, the near-final Release Candidate 1 milestone. RC1 may or may not be the final public test build of IE 7, officials said, depending on tester feedback. Microsoft has said to expect the final version of its standalone browser to be available in the fourth calendar quarter of 2006. Microsoft is planning to push IE 7 out to users via its Automatic Update software-distribution mechanism that is used to deliver security patches to users.

GNOME 2.16 RC1 Released

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2006-08-24 Gnome 5 Comments

The GNOME team has released RC1 of GNOME 2.16. "We are pleased to announce the release of GNOME 2.16.0 Release Candidate 1 (2.15.92). This is one of the last releases in the 2.15 development series and represents a release that is now API/ABI, feature, string and UI frozen. Hard code freeze is quickly approaching : this means that we're pretty close to the final 2.16.0 release. The GNOME contributors are now busy fixing the most important bugs that are still out there, localizing the whole desktop or updating our documentation." You can use jhbuild or GARNOME to build it.

XenSource Releases XenEnterprise

Submitted by Alessandro Perilli 2006-08-24 OS News 2 Comments

After bitter statements around Xen's maturity these last weeks from Red Hat, Novell, and XenSource itself, the company finally launched its first commercial product based on the open source hypervisor: XenEnterprise 1.0. The product adds commercial grade features and support to Xen 3.0. XenSource also built around it a sales channel infrastructure, a technical certification program, and a much discussed agreement with Microsoft.

Submitted by jayson.knight 2006-08-24 Internet Explorer 20 Comments

"We are currently locking down IE7 for shipping and I wanted to give an update on the CSS work that went into IE7. Chris originally outlined our plans for IE7, and we listened to a lot of feedback to help us address the most grievous bugs and prioritize which features to put in for IE7. I like to thank especially the contributors on this blog for their participation. Your feedback made a difference in deciding what issues to address."

Apple Battery Recall Official

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-24 Apple 24 Comments

Gizmodo reports that a battery recall program for Apple PowerBooks and iBooks has started. "The US Consumer Product Safety Commission just made the Apple battery recall official. It'll affect 1.1 million Sony-made batteries in the US alone. Between all the PS3's bad press and these battery recalls, it's not going to be an easy year for Sony, is it?

Unseen PowerPC: the Cores that Didn’t Make It

Submitted by Mike Ainsel 2006-08-24 IBM 24 Comments

MacSlash has an original editorial regarding different PowerPC projects that never made it to shipping. It mentions things like the obscure PowerPC 615 that could run x86 instructions, or the PowerPC 750VX, which would have been IBM's answer to the Motorola G4. This article reads like a requiem, but lest we forget: here, here, here, and of course, here. I'm starting to believe IBM won't miss Apple all that much.

Smart Way to Reinstall Linux Software After System Failure

Submitted by anonymous 2006-08-24 Linux 10 Comments

Hardware and Software failures are part of Life. That is why you need to have a backup. However, you do not need to backup all installed binaries (mostly software). In order to reinstall or restore your installed software you need to have a list of all installed software. This tutorial show how to backup list of installed software and apply it when needed after crash. It will not just save your time but both Debian and RHEL distro can update them instantly for you.

An Introduction to WMI

Submitted by Phlip 2006-08-24 Internet 3 Comments

You have probably heard the term WMI, but may not be familiar with the power behind it. If you are a Windows Administrator or support technician WMI can be one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. In this article we look at the basics of WMI and how to perform WQL queries to retreive information.