Archive
This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. The first 2 parts covered the Hardware and core OS. In this third part we look at security, the file system, file management and throw in a couple of other random ideas for good measure.
When I was first asked to review
this book, I was somewhat taken aback by the title. I wondered if it could be construed as blasphemous. The dictionary came to my rescue with this definition:
damn, adj., beyond doubt or question.
Has is really been a year? How the time flew by... In July 2003 I took a gamble that's paid off like I never imagined it would. In early 2003, I came across Lycoris and Desktop/LX.
The smell of newly purchased stuff... So, there I was, Hauppauge WinTV board in hand, Mandrake 10 installed and ready to rock! Little did I expect that it would come to this. But first things first.
IceWM is a lightweight window manager for UNIX-like systems. Although widely used, it is often underrated - there is hardly any IceWM-related content on the Internet. This article is my attempt to share my experiences as a longtime IceWM user. It contains tips and tricks, usage scenarios, and makes use of examples whenever possible to better demonstrate IceWM's features and capabilities. Finally, the article is meant for those with some familiarity with UNIX, but who are new to IceWM.
In these days there has been much fuzzing about the new browsing with files organizing themselves with the help of meta data. Maybe you ask yourself "What have this to do with the spatial browsing in gnome and how can it improve the browsing?". That's what I did. As I see it, the gnome people have introduced the spatial browsing so we are used to it when this new browsing is coming to town. This is very intelligent move of the gnome people and will help us adopt faster to this. This is when the spatial browsing is really making sense. I hope you see this when you've read this article.
Here I present to you my thoughts on the 7th beta version of SkyOS, followed by an interview with Robert Szeleney, SkyOS' creator and lead developer and a few screenshots.
This is not a typical review of a desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME. These are my observations when I updated from KDE 3.2.3 to KDE 3.3 Beta1.
This series explores the sort of technologies we could use if we were to build a new platform today. In the first part I described a system with a multi-core multi-threaded CPU, FPGA and Cell processors. In this second part we start looking at the Operating System.
My first experience with
Slackware Linux came with version 9.1, after 4 years of using various versions of Red Hat and SUSE Linux. I disliked the general direction these distributions were moving in and didn't see their increasing focus on the "big end of town" as auguring well for either myself or clients of my small one-person IT consultancy business. I quickly became a Slackware convert and have since used it exclusively for all my server deployments. Check in for more and 15 screenshots from Slackware 10.
One of the ultimate goals of music is to provide enjoyment. Be it through association of memories, stimulation, rhythm or melodic messages, music fans all over the world enjoy listening to music.
The other day I attended the
Chat with the Internet Explorer team. While I found it interesting and the fact that Microsoft is opening itself up more to the public by allowing developers to blog and allowing more public exposure at their conferences I will say I was very disappointed in the chat. Microsoft totally ignored the issues and the questions that really mattered were deflected and basically passed on for something more that Microsoft wanted to talk about.
After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.
The
Jackito PDA, which they're calling a TDA (Tactile Digital Assistant) because it uses only the thumbs to control and no stylus, has been announced by French company Novinit. It has in interesting internal architecture, with 7 parallel processors, allowing speed and power savings. They claim that a single AA battery will last a few months. It runs an OS called
3ActilOS but the site doesn't have very much information on it. The images on the web site look like Photoshop jobs, so we'll be interested to see if the $600 machines that they're selling actually exist.
When in the 2.5 builds the GNOME project changed directions of the ever infamous Nautilus to make the interface spatially oriented I was one of the skeptics. Yet, over the years I have used almost every type desktop configuration imaginable with very few that I found not to like or learn from at least at some points. With this in mind I was bound and determined to find the positives of the spatial file paradigm and, glean what I could from it.
This article describes some of my annoyances in computing. If you had any problems reading
this article, then skip this one. It will only be a waste of your time. There are a lot of annoying things in the wonderful world of computing. Of course, nothing is perfect, but that doesn't mean we are not allowed to complain and scream and throw our keyboards at our monitors when yet another irritation pops up.
This article is a quick overview of scheduling in operating systems and presents Bossa, a research project on operating system schedulers and domain-specific languages.
I have written up
an article about a bunch of ideas for 3D desktop development now Project Looking Glass is Open Source. A number of the Looking Glass owners have an interest in the document and it might prove interesting to get an insight into the potential desktop of the future.
One glaring issue I've had since my transition to Linux is video games. Being a Nintendo (consoles) and Sierra (PC) kid, I've gravitated to consoles more lately, but the occasional PC game has kept my interest solidly enough to keep Windows around on a spare drive. I tried WineX (CVS) in the past, and had great success with Diablo II, but didn't bother to try any 'new' games with it.
I
recently blogged on a disconcerting trend that I see at USENIX, and for OS research more generally.
