OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

KDevelop Authors Talk About Their Coming Releases

Submitted by Anonymous Reader 2006-08-08 KDE 10 Comments

"KDevelop is the premier Free integrated development environment. The project is currently working towards KDevelop 3.4 with a bunch of new features and a major new version KDevelop 4. To find out what's coming up in one of KDE's most important projects KDE Dot News spoke to three of the authors about their current work and future plans."

Borland Brings Back Its Turbo Tools

Submitted by anonymous 2006-08-08 General Development 15 Comments

Borland Software's Developer Tools Group is moving back to the company's roots and relaunching its Turbo brand of products - offering the tools both for beginners and nonprogrammers, as well as for professionals. Borland officials said the company is bringing back its Turbo brand of tools as a set of low-cost, language-specific rapid application development tools for students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals.

Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers?

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-08 Apple 110 Comments

Yesterday, Steve Jobs of Apple held his usual keynote speech at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference at the Moscone Center, San Fransisco. I usually thoroughly enjoy Jobs's keynotes; they are a well-planned piece of theater, complete with drama, comedy, and even action. In between, of course, some new products are announced, and some meaningless figures are given (classic example of spin doctoring: use only the figures of your strongest market, in Apple's case, the US laptop market; ignore the rest). However, this time, the theater part seemed to far outweigh the new-products-part. And that's a shame. Note: The, Tuesday Eve Column.

Microsoft: ‘Open Source Is Too Complex’

Submitted by Dennis Chay 2006-08-08 Open Source 43 Comments

Although open-source software can be customized to meet a company's specific needs, its inherent complexity could dent the profitability of independent software vendors, says Microsoft. "One of the beauties of the open-source model is that you get a lot of flexibility and componentization. The big downside is complexity," Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's director of platform strategy, said.

Submitted by Moulinneuf 2006-08-08 Linspire 27 Comments

Three weeks ahead of schedule, version 1.0 of Freespire, the no-cost community version of Linspire, is now available from the project's website. You can download a completely open source version, or a version that includes various proprietary codecs and drivers for an improved out-the-box experience. Screenshots.

Submitted by jeanmarc 2006-08-08 Haiku 3 Comments

Michael Phipps announced that Waltercon 3 will be held in Orlando on October 28th and 29th. Among other news, Haiku has a webdesign contest as well as an icon set contest. The new website will be based on Drupal, the submission deadline is October 1st. The icon contest deadline is September 1st.

VMware for Mac OS; MS Pulls Plug on VirtualPC for Intel Macs

Submitted by Hendrik Enabiel 2006-08-08 OS News 7 Comments

VMware has announced a product designed to enable Mac OS X users to run multiple PC operating systems while Microsoft is putting a halt to a version of its Virtual PC software for Intel-based Macs.

Libferris 1.1.97 with Binary yum Repository for Fedora Core 5

Submitted by Ben Martin 2006-08-08 Fedora Core 2 Comments

The libferris virtual filesystem project now provides a yum repository for installation on Fedora Core 5 machines. With libferris you can mount PostgreSQL, XML, db4 files as a filesystem and also expose it to all applications using ferrisfuse. Extensive support for indexing and searching ferris filesystems is also available in the binary packages.

Apple Launches MacOSForge, Releases Intel Sources, Includes Dtrace

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-08 macOS 38 Comments

Mac OS Forge, a new community site hosted by Apple, is being created to support WebKit and other open source projects focused on Mac OS X, especially those looking to transition from OpenDarwin.org. New buildable kernel sources for Intel-based Macs are posted there as well, finally answering the complaints from the community. Other than this, Xcode 3 now includes Sun's Dtrace.

Unix: An 800 Pound Gorilla No More?

Eugenia Loli 2006-08-08 Unix 11 Comments

Organizations adopting Linux might not abandon Unix entirely. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, has migrated its e-mail system from Sun hardware and Solaris to HP servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But even though the use of Linux on production servers is growing, the practice isn't yet the norm at the laboratory, said Douglas Hughes, a service engineer at JPL Information Services.

Pictures from Apple’s WWDC 2006

Eugenia Loli 2006-08-07 Apple 55 Comments

Jobs introduced today Mac OS X Leopard, built-to-order Xeon-based Mac Pros and XServes. We attended the keynote and we just posted some pictures below. We loved these new Mac beasts, plus Time Machine looked really cool. The rest of the OSX features were mostly evolutionary.

SLED 10 Is a Linux Distro Windows Users Can Love

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-07 SuSE, openSUSE 60 Comments

"In a fairly short time, Novell has transformed itself from a firm that had next to nothing to do with Linux into one of the Penguin's most visible and aggressive flag-bearers. For evidence of this metamorphosis, we need look no further than Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which breaks ground in the client operating system territory that Linux leader Red Hat has so far opted scarcely to tread. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or SLED, is the most polished Linux client operating system we've yet tested, and well-deserving of our Analyst's Choice designation."

Apple Previews Mac OS X 10.5, Launches Mac Pro, Intel Xserve

Thom Holwerda 2006-08-07 Apple 84 Comments

At the 2006 WWDC in San Fransisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced several new products during his opening keynote speech. Read more for a chronological summary of the keynote-- including the much-debated preview of Mac OS 10.5, Leopard, which, according to Steve Jobs, will ship this spring. Update: Apparantly, a similar feature to Time Machine already exists in Linux. It is called 'Dervish'.

Submitted by netpython 2006-08-07 AMD 30 Comments

Chip guru AMD has announced that it's going to drop the ATI brand name following its takeover of the Canadian graphics underdog. Gareth Cater from AMD told Custom PC that 'the new company will be called AMD', meaning that we could shortly be seeing AMD-branded Radeon graphics chips.

Submitted by Finalzone 2006-08-07 Fedora Core 16 Comments

The Fedora Project announces the availability of Fedora Core 6 Test 2. One of noticeable features is the ability for Anaconda, the Fedora Core installer, to use other repositories, the support for MacIntel and for the first time, Firefox can now use Java through gcjplugweb. This distribution is aimed for testers due to bugs needed to be sorted. Download are available through torrent and mirror servers. Update by AS: Fixed typo. Update by ELQ: OSDir put up some shots of the FC6-test2.

Submitted by diegocg 2006-08-07 Google 35 Comments

In a surprising move, Andrew Morton, the Linux kernel co-maintainer, announced that he is moving to Google and that he will continue being a Linux maintainer. A detailed article can be found here: "It is beneficial to me (and to Linux) that I be in day-to-day contact with people who use Linux for real things. Hence Google is a good all-round fit."

Submitted by Tomasz Dominikowski 2006-08-07 SkyOS 10 Comments

Gecko, the powerful rendering engine used in Mozilla products like Firefox, is now available as an embedded widget in SkyOS. Using WidgetGecko you can easily add powerful HTML support to a SkyOS application with just a few lines of code. Embedded Gecko brings the SkyOS Media Station project closer to reality.

First Windows Browser Based on Apple’s Webkit

Submitted by anon 2006-08-07 Internet 34 Comments

"Welcome to GetWebKit, the home of the first and only WebKit based Windows web browser. Featuring the excellent rendering engine used in popular Macintosh web browsers Safari and Shiira, GetWebKit offers a free, powerful, and open-source internet experience." Seems like besides Opera, IE, and Gecko, there is now a 4th mature engine coming to the Windows platform.

Dell To Sell AMD-Based Notebooks

Submitted by Ashton Lee 2006-08-07 AMD 8 Comments

Following its recent partnership with AMD to put the latter's chip in its server product line, Dell Computer confirmed this week that it will launch AMD-based laptops as early as October. The move could deal another blow to rival Intel. Dell will release mobile computers running AMD's Sempron and Turion 64x2 processors in early October, representatives from both AMD and Dell, told CNET Taiwan. Initial plans will target consumer models equipped with 15.4-inch displays.

Finding the User Settings in Vista

Submitted by esther schindler 2006-08-07 Windows 6 Comments

For reasons nobody quite understands, Microsoft changed a lot of settings in Vista. Any programmer whose application hard-coded directory settings will soon discover that the application will fail to run well. This article summarizes the changes and how to code around the problem in a version-neutral way.