Archive

This is a report on the second day of USENIX 2005. You might want to start with my report on day one. Day two started off a bit slowly. Oh wait, actually I started off a bit slowly. That could have been from the margaritas last night at La Casa Garcia, a Mexican restaurant a few blocks down the street from the Anaheim Marriott. Good Mexican food is one of the things I miss the most since I moved from California to New York two years ago. Luckily, the food at La Casa Garcia was excellent.

I just want to show you a great add-on for DOS, called DESKWORK. It's an operating system build upon DOS, just like older Windows versions were build upon DOS. It has been written by Konstantin Koll for several years now, who founded a small company called Mystic Bytes to produce DESKWORK.

The Enterprise Volume Management System, or EVMS, is a disk, partition, and file system manager for Linux that claims to be a comprehensive tool for all disk management tasks. I ran across EVMS and found the idea appealing, so I decided to try it out. I've been working with it for a couple of weeks now, and this article describes what I found.

I've only been using GNU/Linux since 2001, so I won't say that I'm by any means an expert yet, as most of those that are reading this, probably have been using Linux much longer than I have. However, I still have high hopes for the Linux scene. The purpose of this article is to voice my personal opinion on what I feel is keeping GNU/Linux from taking over the mainstream operating system market. My intentions aren't to "badtalk" the open source kernel+apps, but rather give constructive criticsm on what I personally feel it could be done better.

With some free time and some spare equipment lying around, I decided to give Novell's Open Enterprise Server an install. I work in a Netware environment, but given recent trends, I decided to try and drop OES on a fresh SuSE Enterprise install. This isn't a comprehensive review; rather it's just some comments while I was just playing around. It might give people a better idea what OES actually is.

I'll try to explain my experience on updating Ubuntu 4.10 Warty to 5.04 Hoary. I've been a Debian user for some years, and updated the system at least twice (Woody -> Sarge -> Sid) with apt-get dist-upgrade. I followed exactly the Hoary release notes with Synaptic, but life isn't always a path of roses, and there are some glitches that need to be solved. Discover which ones

I wrote a little article about my experiences with my new powerbook, Mac OS X and Linux.

Linspire has always intrigued me, it's a professional class operating system aimed at the mainstream market, and one of the few Linux distributions available in boxed sets. I've never really been a big fan of Linspire though, because I am a power user. Still, I was intrigued enough to inquire about reviewing Linspire, and they were nice enough to provide me with a digital download copy with a trial Click N Run (CNR) subscription. I wasn't too keen about blowing away my Fedora installation (I only have one computer with enough resources to run anything above DOS) but eventually curiousity took over, and I went for it.

Today, there is no shortage of reviews on Linux on the Desktop, but I think we can benefit from more "Laptopized-Linux" experiences. As laptops keep dropping in price and increasing in terms of computing power, they really make a nice platform even for cpu intensive applications such as sofware development, desktop publishing, web design, etc. And as you will see in this article, installing Linux on a laptop is not as hairy as you may think.

Linux is losing momentum among medium sized enterprises, according to a survey by Canadian research firm Info-Tech Research Group. After years of increased interest in the open source operating system, IT managers from medium sized businesses have come to a conclusion that open source is not for them. The findings point to a rift between large enterprises that are increasingly embracing open source and smaller businesses that opt for a Microsoft-centric world.

Regularly as always here are the new GNUstep GUI 0.9.5 libraries. GNUstep libraries can now installed much easier using the one startup tarball.

A new programming language has been sighted, it goes by the affectionate name "nessie" and it claims to be the loch ness monster of programming languages.

After two and a half years of work, autopackage 1.0 has finally escaped into the wild. It has a fundamentally new design, and offers an alternative system of software distribution and management on Linux. This article will talk about what this means for the Linux community, and what new directions and possibilities it opens up. It'll talk about problems remaining to be solved, and finally it will propose solutions for them. If you just want to see what autopackage is like, check out the screenshots or the Flash demo, available from the website.

Today I thought about how I can make my very own application to only link against those libraries that it really requires and not those it get provided by PKG-CONFIG.