Eugenia Loli Archive

Usability has always been a controversial aspect of free software development, but one that is becoming increasingly important along with the uptake of GNU/Linux distributions in businesses and homes. Developers' discussions about usability are often marked by shrill accusations and defensive responses. Implementing usability suggestions can mean giving up months of feature-building. But according to a few developers and usability experts working on KDE, bringing usability experts into the hackers' work processes can be a big help.

Among the flavors of UNIX, Solaris is considered to be the closest to Linux, so before starting a port of large Unix-based application to Linux, the OS-dependent code is generally picked up from Solaris. But for migration purposes, differences can arise in the areas that depend on the architecture, memory maps, threading, or some specific areas like system administration or natural language support.

Mozilla released a security fixed version of Firefox, 1.0.4.

Havoc of Red Hat and Miguel of Novell continue their debate over Java and Mono as the language of the future for Gnome.

The Mac mini is an ideal low-cost, high-performance PowerPC development platform for numerous applications. Learn how to install and configure Linux on the mini. Future articles will add the software required to make it into a stand-alone multimedia appliance.

Hollywood (and RIAA) seem to be behind the times when it comes to technology and potential new business opportunities. For years now PocketPCs are able to decode mpeg, divx and wmv videos full speed and yet we can't buy movies in SD/CF format to watch while we waiting on that bus stop.

Bill Gates doesn't think his company has been slow to crack the cell phone market. He just thinks the little devices have yet to catch up to the power of his company's software. Windows Mobile 5 was announced today, image gallery, webcast and Bluetooth tools PR. Dell and HP announced upgrades for their PDA models to the latest version of the Windows Mobile OS.

The third and final development release of Fedora Core 4 is now available for download and testing.

When Microsoft chairman Bill Gates touts his company's next Windows operating system, code-named Longhorn, he can barely contain his enthusiasm, adding "it will be super to get that out in the hands of our customers." The big question is whether customers will share Gates' enthusiasm more than a year from now.

This is a new video available on the SkyOS homepage, showing off the new indexing service. This service (which continuously runs in the background) will examine all new or updated files on a SkyFS volume. For each file, the plugin-based Index Feeder will try to extract as much information as possible from the file. This information will then be attached to the file in the form of attributes, which makes it possible to quickly search for it by using the SkyFS Index and Live Queries. It should be noted that what is seen in the video is only the back-end controls for the indexing service; for the final release of SkyOS, the controls will be implemented system-wide within the SkyOS GUI.

Apple's greatest hit was not the Macintosh, iMac or iPod, it was the Apple II. The machine helped bankroll Apple's big projects (LISA, Macintosh, Newton) well into the nineties. Read about Apple's history before the Macintosh at the Low End Mac.

FreeBSD 5.4 has been released. Many improvements in functionality and stability have been made since the FreeBSD 5.3 release. Most users should find 5.4 stable enough to migrate off the aging 4.X branch. New features include:

The X-Fi is poised to bring huge tracts of audio processing horsepower to the PC, delivering new levels of audio effects in games, and enabling very versatile digital audio workstations.

"I have very mixed feelings about this release of Slackware. I do not think that the underlying philosophy of Slackware is obsolete. The concept of a system that can be configured and molded to the n'th degree is still in my opinion very much a good idea. However, this release of Slackware is not without its problems in execution." Read the review here.