Archive
November, 15 2004. The Solaris 10/NC04Q4 Launch 2004. Dawn in San Jose, CA was a truly beautiful sight to behold on Monday. As the sun rose over the mountains and shed its light on the valley below - the city, which the night before had seemed so unimpressive, suddenly came to life in the shimmer of the sun's rays. It seemed a perfect morning for the launch of Sun's most ambitious project to date. The press and other attendees looked happy, hopeful. Sun's folks were excited - especially the engineers.
This article, is a description of my efforts to build a minimal FreeBSD system from scratch and run it under the Bochs emulator. Inspired by "FreeBSD From Scratch" by Jens Schweikhardt, this article extends its ideas by using a file backed virtual disk, as the installation directory and harddisk image under Bochs.
I've been using Linux since the Redhat days. Since then, it has grown from a curious look to a hobby, and more recently to my main operating system. Due to starting out with Redhat, I admit to being partial to the Redhat/Fedora series. Don't let that concern you though, as I've tried all of the mainstream distributions, even Lycoris and Linspire.
Free and open source software is often criticised for being less usable than its commercial equivalent. Good user interface design isn't some magical thing that FOSS developers can't do for themselves, however. I've written a
short article describing five key points of good interface design that any developer can use in their projects. (Note: hosted on a slow connection, please use the
Coral Cache if possible).
I think that everyone reading OSNews will have heard at least something about QNX. You can regard this article as an introduction, but also as a review, and as a "Is-QNX-Ready-For-The-Desktop? article". To start off, I put together a short explanation of the merits of using a microkernel. Let me start off by saying that QNX Software Systems (QSS) does not aim towards the desktop with their Neutrino RTOS.
According to many economists, Gilbert Amelio is the savior of businesses in trouble. With this in mind, the board of directors at Apple decided to appoint Gil Amelio to the board after reporting another huge loss in 1994. At the time, Michael Spindler was the head of Apple, and sales in every division. The board accepted Spindler's resignation and appointed Gil Amelio to the helm of Apple.
Linux laptop support has been in my experience abysmal at best. Things that just work when running Windows XP are either horribly broken, or simply not implemented at all under Linux. Many Linux distributions have little or no real ACPI support. Imagine using your laptop without a battery meter, or any noticeable fan control whatsoever. Due to the lack of mature ACPI support in most modern distributions, I have had to deal with a very large amount of suffering.
While Suse 9.2 Pro was announced close to a month ago, it was only made available for purchase recently. I was originally going to compare Suse 9.2 to something like RedHat WS 3.0. However, both Novell/Suse and RedHat seem to now be offering a corporate desktop solution and a "desktop for the masses" solution.
Last year IBM introduced a cut-down POWER4 CPU called the PowerPC 970 and Apple promptly put it into their PowerMac line. IBM are not standing still; the POWER5 is out and rumours have long hinted at a successor to the 970 being in development. What should we expect?
As part of the development team, we're announcing PVFS2 version 1.0 here in Pittsburgh at the
SC2004 conference!
For a few years, I've been working in the real world, I mean the enterprise world, sorry. In every company I've worked for, they offered me the opportunity to learn a lot of new things, or at least that's what they always said in the first meeting before sending me to be just another company programmer. But in fact I've learned some very important things, just not about programming. I had to learn about these things on my own, about the needs of a real company in the real world.
With the recent browser statistics, that show Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari/Konqueror and Opera combined at around 95%, it is finally feasible to write modern, CSS-based websites. For many years, this was not possible due to the vast number of legacy browsers, Internet Explorer 4 and 5 and Netscape 4 deployed on the computers around the planet. But with these browsers vanishing, we can finally start to ignore them.
Guest post by Karl vom Dorff
2004-11-10
Haiku
Pierluigi Fiorini
discusses the future of his BeFree project and decides to use Qt for his goals.
Ideally someone else would write this article since I'm connected to DesktopX. But with all the enthusiasm over "widgets" lately and Konfabulator's release
on Windows today,
I've written up my best attempt at neutrality in looking at the pros of each program.
I've always had mixed feelings about the Open Source movement because while my feelings suggest that this is surely a great innovation in software development, there are other (many) things that I don't agree with. Nevertheless, I've been contributing to free software (or open source) since 1996 and I'm still doing it. Nothing famous or that you might have heard of, though. But enough that I feel I have some insight on the subject.
Although it is not an official build, PearPC .4pre has been released on Richard Goodwin's site. You can pick it up
here.
Guest post by de_board
2004-11-04
Linux
After a long delay, Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 is
now shipping. Yellow Dog is a Fedora-based Linux distribution for PowerPC processors.
We assume Bochs is already installed. You can download an bootable Bochs disk image from
here. Then uncompress it with "tar -jxvf disk1.tar.bz2" and modify Bochs' configuration (make the cd bootable) ~/.bochsrc:
boot: disk ata0-master: type=disk, mode=flat, translation=auto, path="/freevms/freevms.dsk", cylinders=130, heads=16, spt=63, biosdetect=auto, model="Generic 1234". It should show you
this boot prompt. More FreeVMS info
here.
By all means,
Ubuntu Linux and
Canonical Ltd. have made a spectacular arrival on the Linux scene lately. The combination is like a dream come true for many, many Linux aficionados: tightly selected bleeding edge packages to focus the distribution on a single CD, corporate backing, 18 month support, that all sounds like a formidable package.
Recent news has covered the release of many new smart phones. We have the new
Treo650, the new
Sony P910, the new
Audiovox PPC 6000, the new
Blackberry 7100, and the new
Nokia 6670. Recently, I've been speaking via email almost daily with my AT&T (
now Cingular) rep. For some reason, the conversation always steers towards his wanting to push the latest from Nokia, Blackberry, etc.
