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Ubuntu To Preserve Binary Driver Status Quo, Axe PowerPC Version

"The Ubuntu Technical Board has made two technical decisions of which we would like to inform the Ubuntu community. Both of these decisions concern the upcoming 7.04 release of Ubuntu, scheduled for mid-April." Ubuntu 7.04 will not activate binary video drivers by default, essentially meaning nothing will change from the previous releases. The second change is a major blow to the PowerPC architecture and thus owners of Apple PPC hardware: "The PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team." Translation: Ubuntu PPC can shake hands with the dodo.

Decentralised Installation Systems

In the Free and Open Source communities we are proud of our 'bazaar' model, where anyone can join in by setting up a project and publishing their programs. Users are free to pick and choose whatever software they want... provided they're happy to compile from source, resolve dependencies manually and give up automatic security and feature updates. In this essay, I introduce 'decentralised' installation systems, such as Autopackage and Zero Install, which aim to provide these missing features.

End User Programming Packages: Revolution

Revolution is descended in spirit from Hypercard (HC). When Apple's support for HC withered, Scott Raney developed Metacard (MC), a near clone. Metacard was then bought by Revolution (RR), based in Scotland. Metacard was two quite distinct things: an engine, and an IDE. When Metacard was sold, the MC IDE became public domain. It still exists, is volunteer maintained, and it can be used with the latest RR engine. Some on the RR user mailing list prefer the much simpler MC IDE to the RR IDE, at least for initial project development. Other IDEs are possible, and there is a third party (non-free) IDE called Galaxy.

Are We Being Served?

Web 2.0 throws a lot of buzzwords at us. New technology has given us new terms to describe a particular design process. One of these is "user-centric" design. An example of a website that isn't user-centric would be microsoft.com. A static site where the users have no control over the content of the site, nor any choice in what they see. The company displays the information they deem important. This is considered web 1.0. (Note by AS: a new microsoft.com site has gone live since this submission). YouTube and Digg are examples of Web 2.0, user-centric sites whereby the users of the site contribute not only the content that the other users consume, but each user helps decide what content is promoted. Today, I'm going to coin a new term: self-centric design. To define this new term, I will compare OSNews to one of the leading web 2.0 sites: Digg.

What It Would Take for Me to Consider RISC OS Again

In common with a lot of people who used to use RISCOS, I don't use it now and that is the focus of this article: Why don't I use it any more and what would it take to make me use it again? Of course, an article of this sort still has worth as there is bound to be some degree of correlation between my feelings, experiences and hopes in relation to the platform and those other people.

Introducing the Extensible Driver Interface

On December 28th, 2005 - a day which will live in anonymity - OSNews published an editorial of mine urging hobby and research operating system developers to implement Project UDI, because otherwise we (the small/ non-mainstream/ hobby/research OS community) would always wind up stuck with mutually incompatible sets of drivers for doing the same exact things. I also proclaimed that I would implement UDI for my own operating system kernel. Bad decision.

A Very Critical Look at OS Re-creation Projects

There are at this time, a number of what I would term 'OS re-creation projects' (OSRs) in active development. These are OSes that attempt, by varying degrees, to re-implement the features of another operating system. In this article, I'm going to explore some of issues surrounding projects of this type. In the second half of the article, I apply these observations and examine two example platforms (Amiga and OS/2) and the related re-creation OSes.

Moving Away From WIMP Interfaces One Step at a Time

While the capabilities of operating systems have improved over the last years, the improvements have largely focused on under the hood changes. New functionality is reaching the user via additional applications which allow her to write a DVD, connect to her mp3 player, download streaming video locally and other tasks which were not present before. But the graphical interface of the computer itself is keeping the same concepts introduced with its appearance. One could argue that the graphical environment of computers is exactly the same for the last 10 years and only cosmetic changes take place in newer versions of operating systems. Moving away from the desktop metaphor is harder than it seems. Even alternative operating systems have embraced the concept instead of exploring new ideas. This article describes a solution which attempts to free the user from the files/folder concept.

In the Future, the Past Won’t Be Present

History tends to leave behind mostly two kinds of information - the irrelevant and the biased. Archaeologists are either digging up people's thrown away junk, or reading some emperor's pompous account of his great deeds. The archaeology of the future will involve carefully extracting random 1s and 0s off of media and theorising what it all could mean. In the reckless and fast moving digital world, many stumbling blocks have been created that would drastically inhibit future generations learning about our ancient digital existence.

Review: Freespire 1.0

In the midst of the busy semester here at school, my fiancee's laptop, running Windows XP SP2, picked up some friends - adware, trojans, etc. It was a pretty nasty sight. I worked on it for at least two hours every couple of days, wiping it clean, doing my best to lock it down, and so on. Avast! and Ad-Aware had their limits it seemed, for only a day or so after I cleaned it, pop-ups and weird stuff would show up again. She was getting sick of it. I was getting sick of cleaning it, so I suggested, offhand, installing a different operating system that is a bit more impervious to those nasties. To my surprise, she agreed.

Palm Launches Treo 680; Palm OS Dead

Palm has launched a new sibling in its Treo smartphone line today, the Treo 680, using the PalmOS. "For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more." No Wifi though. At the same time, Palm OS died.

My Dream Operating System

This article is a inspired by some of the ideas which seem be constantly floating around my mind whenever I think about or read about operating systems. Surely, every time-served OS-geek carries a mental list of this sort around with them? This is a summary of all of the features which I would like to see in my dream FOSS based Operating System.