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DragonFly BSD 1.4 is the third major release of Matthew Dillon's fork of the FreeBSD operating system, and significant progress has been made towards reaching many of the project's numerous goals. New in this release include a more up to date version of the GNU Compiler Collection (required due to the incread use of thread local storage in DragonFly), an import of NetBSD's Citrus code (Comprehensive I18N Framework Towards Respectable Unix Systems), major reworking of all core subsystems in preparation for removing the MP lock, rewrites of various VFS related code and many updated drivers, frameworks and contributed programs.
What ever happened to the total computer newbies who tried Debian (
part I |
part II)? Mike, Diane, Mary & Carla are still doing very well, although much has changed since the first articles were written. They no longer use
Libranet. They no longer use
Gnome & believe it or not,
Windows has now been installed. Read along to find out what happened.
Guest post by Alcibiades
2006-01-04
Windows
Like a lot of people who have worked in the business, I find myself in conversations about computer security with people who are having problems or know people who have problems. I wrote this to save me from explaining the same thing over and over again to different people, and to save them the trouble of having to make notes as we talked. It was meant to be something you could give to a 'naive user' and have them be able to read and follow it more or less unaided, and while not being a complete guide, at least be something that made them more secure than before they got it.
I was interested to see how Zenwalk differs from Slackware, and after reading on their
web site that version 2.01 is 'the biggest jump in Zenwalk evolution since the beginning of the project', I wanted to see how far Zenwalk has come since it was reviewed
here as MiniSlack.
Right now the situation for developers of minor operating systems seems somewhat bleak. Windows and the Unixes compete in the server world, and Windows and MacOS X compete on the desktop. Linux even gets ported to every embedded device, leaving few niches for the hobbyist or sidelined operating system developer. Some have even gone so far as to say that
New Operating Systems Won't Stand a Chance. As anyone who reads OSNews can tell you, however there are a wealth of new systems with new ideas that just aren't taking off. Given all these new ideas some - like capability security from
EROS for example - should be good enough to catch on, so why aren't they?
Guest post by Anonymous Reader
2005-12-21
Wayland
Yes it would be nice if X.org could use OpenGL directly for it's display and composition, but to date, nobody has made this possible. Is it wrong for a business to make it so? Since when does developing software for GNU products mean that they aren't allowed to do it privately? If Novell is developing XGL behind closed doors, and paying the developers to build it... Where's the problem?
Guest post by Alcibiades
2005-12-20
Linux
In order to see what is needed in book writing applications, you need
to look carefully at the desk of someone who is actively writing a
book. You will most likely see piles of paper, often cut up and marked
with pencil, and if you examine those of the papers that are in piles,
you will see that the pagination is all over the place because pages
have been reordered. Read on...
This
latest installment in the Core series from Prentice Hall PTR is a welcome arrival to the PHP/MySQL space. It is jam packed with useful information. At a little over 850 pages, this volume contains information on nearly every topic of interest in both the PHP and MySQL subject areas. The author, Marc Wandschneider, brings considerable industry experience to the book and it shows in the detailed explanations that fill every page.
This was a mixed Thanksgiving weekend for open source communities. We
had a renewed PR onslaught from proprietary software vendors ("
Linux
is anti-commercial") and even
hardball politics.
But there were lot of interesting announcements made: Firefox 1.5,
codenamed "Deer Park" will finally be unwrapped on November 29th (I
have been using the beta, and I love it). Among all this activity and
with little fan-fare, the Amanda project launched its new
Wiki and
Forums.
The ICT-Business is known for strategic terms. One of those terms, which was used quite a lot over this year, is services. The term is interpretable; however, the focus was on technical concepts implemented to serve for a sharply rendered use case, like managing user data and authentication. Services in that sense are served over a type of network. Despite the first impression, they are not served to a user but to a calling application. This client utilizes one or more services for internal purposes. Though, the user may be expected to provide data (the password, for example) or to wait and receive a gathered result.
OpenDocument got a lot of publicity lately. StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 finally arrived, and all the other makers of office suites (with the notable exception of Microsoft) have started implementing the new standard into their programs. Massachusetts recently decided to use OpenDocument as the standard file format, effectively locking out MS Office as soon as January 1st, 2007. Other countries are on their way to do the same. Also, OpenDocument recently got submitted to become an ISO standard.
I recently bought one of the new dual core PowerMacs. Having used the machine for a couple of weeks, I thought I would share some of my observations and feelings about it. First, let me get my biases out in the open. I have, for about four years, very happily used Linux on my desktop. Doing so has made me very comfortable with the UNIX environment in general, and with GNOME specifically. During that time, I have used OS X machines on a regular basis, so I am quite comfortable in that environment as well. Since I switched to Linux, I have not used Windows for anything more than the occasional bit of software testing or lab work, and generally feel quite uncomfortable with it. Thus, this article is very much written from the perspective of someone who finds OS X and Linux pleasing on principle. I implore the reader to make his own value judgments based on my comments.
At the end of October I attended the
Alantejo
Linux congress and LAN party, which was held in the
city of
Évora.
Évora is a marvelous UNESCO World
Heritage city which has from Roman ruins to 18th century buildings,
not to mention the superb food. It is
well worth the visit if you happen to travel to Portugal.
At this meeting a conference was given
by José Antonio León Moreno
from the "Center of New Initiatives" in
Extremadura (Spain)
about the
Linex project where he stated
mildly that the Spanish region of Extremadura is using Linux on the
desktop in the PCs used by the public administration civil servants of
the region of Extremadura.
Ever since networking came out, one important issue, to a various
extent over the time, has been how to give the legitimate users the
right access - authentication, which is one of the three basic elements
in security: authentication, authorization and access control.
"Yesterday, I was among a few lucky journalists in New York City who got a rare chance to play a collection of new games on the eagerly awaited Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. In short,
I was impressed. The brain, capable of one teraflop, is three symmetrical IBM cores running at 3.2 GHz each. Stellar graphics performance is provided by a 500 MHz custom ATI graphics processor and backed up by super fast memory, 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM that is shared with the CPUs via a unified memory architecture."
I've been wanting to try
Gentoo for some time, but always had to roll my eyes at the pages and pages of installation instructions. This time, however, I rolled up my sleeves and buckled down. Minutes later, I was on my way.
After having
a look at a very low-end camera two weeks ago, I've stepped a bit up in the range to have a look at a 5 megapixel model, a
Kodak CX7530, which can currently be bought a
Geeks.com for $175. Just like I found that the CX7220 was able to produce good 4x6 prints, I was surprised to see that CX7530 is capable of very good letter-size prints.
In about six weeks time developers from all over the world will convene
in Prague for the
2005 edition of the
Firebird Conference. This year's conference has an even greater
abundance of speakers and topics than the previous editions of the event.
The
various
tracks on the conference will cover Firebird itself, development
languages and solution stacks, development tools and issues and
applications. And, of course, it is a great opportunity to meet the
community.
Powerscale4ppc (Power and Frequency Scaling for the IBM PowerPC 970) is an IBM free-trial emerging technology power management solution that demonstrates a power management implementation for the PPC970FX and CPC925 bridge chips on the Maple-D
PC970FX evaluation platform running on Linux. This technology demonstrates how to dynamically scale the system’s operating frequency from F to F/2, in order to create a cooler, more power-efficient system.
As a photographer, with some high-end equipment, I used to look down on point-and-shoot digicams, putting them in the same category as camera phone, i.e. not capable of taking any picture worth keeping. I was wrong. My experience with a
Kodak CX7220 (sells for about $70), graciously provided by
Geeks.com, turned out to be unexpectedly positive.
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