Archive

New Icaros Desktop supports old Amiga M68K applications

Guest post by paolone 2012-07-20 Amiga & AROS 38 Comments

The AROS distribution Icaros Desktop has made its next step towards compatibility with legacy Amiga workbench applications, including an entire AROS enviroment compiled for the classic Amiga platform, which is almost binary compatible with the original Amiga OS 3.1 (and its extensions). When the user needs an old program, he or she only has to fire up the AROS M68K environment and run the application. The Amiga virtual machine can optionally be set to run at startup like a system service.

Contiki 2.6 released

Guest post by Adam Dunkels 2012-07-17 OS News 5 Comments

Version 2.6 of Contiki, the open source operating system for the Internet of Things, has just been released. With its IP stack that fits in a few kilobyte of memory, Contiki lets tiny battery-operated wireless devices communicate directly over the Internet. Contiki is used in a wide variety of systems such as city sound monitoring, street lights, networked electrical power meters, industrial monitoring, radiation monitoring, construction site monitoring, alarm systems, and remote house monitoring. The 2.6 release introduces Antelope, a new SQL-like database for tiny flash memories, as well as a new JSON/HTTP webservice back-end.

Syllable gets Enlightenment graphics engine

Guest post by Kaj-de-Vos 2012-07-16 Syllable, AtheOS 18 Comments

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the first release of Syllable Desktop, then plainly called Syllable 0.4.0. The original website and announcement are gone, and many other circumstances of the time have changed quite dramatically. The project is happy that Syllable is still here - which, judging by comparable ventures, is a feat to be proud of.

Confirmed: Mountain Lion incompatible with some 64bit Macs

Guest post by moondevil 2012-07-11 macOS 64 Comments

Ars Technica is reporting that certain 64bit Mac models won't be able to run Mountain Lion. The problem is the graphic card drivers; these are still 32bit, and Apple is unwilling to update them to 64bit. A 64bit kernel can't load 32bit drivers, so that's that. Apple has a list of supported models on their Mountain Lion upgrade page, so you can easily check if your computer is capable of running Mountain Lion.

N9 gets firmware update, MeeGo/Maemo team leaves Nokia

Guest post by nej_simon 2012-07-04 Wireless 71 Comments

The only MeeGo device to ever be released, the Nokia N9, has been updated to MeeGo/Harmattan 1.3. Among the improvements are improved performance, updated applications, improved NFC support, improved copy/paste, and more. In other news, the team behind MeeGo and Maemo is now leaving Nokia, probably making this the last update for the N9.

Android skinning is not responsible for delays

Guest post by Radio 2012-07-02 Google 26 Comments

It was time somebody cleared that up: the oft-decried skins put by OEM and operators on Android are not responsible for the lateness or lack of updates. The truth is that skins are easy, hardware drivers are hard. That is not to say skins do not have other problems, or that the problem is unsolvable, but asking for "stock" Android OS is not going to help on the update front.

Windows 8 and Hyper-V

Guest post by Drumhellar 2012-06-28 Windows 25 Comments

Since its introduction at Microsoft's BUILD conference last September, Windows 8 has garnered a large measure of attention, especially with regards to the new Metro interface. The feature that intrigued me the most, however, was the inclusion of Hyper-V.

WebOS ‘Community Edition’ released, hinting at ports

Guest post by Radio 2012-06-28 Wireless 4 Comments

The WebOS team has released the code of a "community edition" of the operating system, a development base to get to the Open WebOS image due for September. Also, a WebOS ports team has been set up "to support Open webOS 1.0 on well-documented mobile devices with readily available hardware drivers". Let's hope they are targeting some good Android phones.

First details of BlackBerry 10 smartphones leaked

Guest post by Moochman 2012-06-26 Wireless 29 Comments

According to N4BB.com, internal documents from RIM have been leaked, revealing the screen sizes and form factors of two phones planned for commercial release.

Beyond the smartphone: 5 emerging platforms for developers

Guest post by snydeq 2012-06-25 General Development No Comments

From the car to the living room, technologies and markets are fast evolving to offer possibilities for programming pioneers. "The smartphone has proven that a marketplace for delivering code can appear seemingly out of nowhere, and developers would have another choice for showcasing their wares. To help you get a jump on these promising platforms, we did a little digging in what might seem to be unlikely places. In many cases, raw APIs are already well-established, ready for apps to exploit them. Scratch the surface, and you'll get an idea of the potential of porting your wares beyond the smartphone/PC paradigm. You can bet the manufacturers of these products are interested in establishing their own app ecology."

Fedora, secure boot, and an insecure future

Guest post by Elv13 2012-06-17 Hardware 47 Comments

"The UEFI secure boot mechanism has been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community, and for good reason: it could easily be a mechanism by which we lose control over our own systems. Recently, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett described how the Fedora distribution planned to handle secure boot in the Fedora 18 release. That posting has inspired a great deal of concern and criticism, though, arguably, about the wrong things."

OSX’s Dwindling Support for Third-World Languages

Guest post by Eisel Mazard 2012-06-14 OS News 43 Comments

The average computer user might think that the number of languages their operating system supports is pretty long. OSX supports 22 languages, and Microsoft claims to support 96, but they're counting different regional dialects multiple times. But there are over 6000 languages, and though many of them are spoken by a dwindling few, there are some languages that are spoken by millions of people that are supported very poorly, if at all, by computer operating systems. The reason for the support being poor is that the people who speak those languages are poor, and are not good "markets." It's only because of the efforts of a few dedicated people that computing support for languages such as Burmese, Sinhalese, Pali, Cambodian, and Lao have been as good as they are, but the trends for the future are not good.

Bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD, sets up shop

Guest post by Bob Sacamano 2012-06-12 OpenBSD 14 Comments

Bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD, has surfaced. It aims to be less conservative than OpenBSD by being less loose with new features and only supporting modern architectures. Bitrig has also converted over to using LLVM's clang rather than GNU gcc for it's toolchain/compiler. A roadmap for Bitrig is also available.

A uTouch architecture introduction

Guest post by Elv13 2012-06-03 Linux 15 Comments

"As the Linux desktop increases in popularity, the user interface experience has become increasingly important. For example, most laptops today have multitouch capabilities that have yet to be fully exposed and exploited in the free software ecosystem. Soon we will be carrying around multitouch tablets with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation. In order to provide a high-quality and rich experience we must fully exploit multitouch gestures. The uTouch stack developed by Canonical aims to provide a foundation for gestures on the Linux desktop."

Genode 12.05: new USB stack, runs GCC, plays media

Guest post by Norman Feske 2012-05-30 OS News 7 Comments

With the ability to run the GNU tool chain including GCC, binutils, and GNU make, the Genode OS framework has taken another big step towards becoming a general-purpose OS. The just released version 12.05 introduces Genode's file-system infrastructure along with support for stacked file systems, extends the framework API with support for configuring system components on-thy-fly, and adds media replay capabilities.

Linux 3.4 released

Guest post by diegocg 2012-05-21 Linux 11 Comments

Linux kernel 3.4 has been released. New features include several Btrfs updates: support of metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much improved metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools; there is also a new X32 ABI which allows to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, two new device-mapper targets, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module. Here's the full list of changes.

EDE 2.0 released

Guest post by karijes 2012-05-21 Desktop environments 20 Comments

EDE is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply put, a desktop should not get in your way. This is the final 2.0 release, a major rework. Summarizing previous alpha and beta releases, 2.0 is now fully FLTK powered (eFLTK is deprecated) and freedesktop.org friendly. Specificaly, this release adds a new notification daemon, replaces the old edewm with the pekwm window manager, fixes a lot of issues and memory leaks, and more. Grab the release and try it. You can also try ede netinstall, a single command that will download and compile EDE for you.

Systemd tuning gets boot times down to less than 2 seconds

Guest post by diegocg 2012-05-13 Linux 65 Comments

Lennart Poettering, the author of systemd, has announced: "I just put a first version of a wiki document together that lists a couple of easy optimizations to get your boot times down to 2s. It also includes a list of suggested things to hack on to get even quicker boot-ups."

Building native iOS apps with RubyMotion

Guest post by eml.nu 2012-05-04 Apple 11 Comments

"In 2007, software developer Laurent Sansonetti launched an open source software project called MacRuby. It aimed to build a Ruby interpreter on top of the Objective-C runtime, providing a seamless bridge between Ruby and OS X "Cocoa" ecosystemâ€”and it succeeded. Now Sansonetti hopes to do something similar for iOS."

You thought SOPA & PIPA were defeated?

Guest post by Guest 2012-04-24 Internet 24 Comments

The SOPA and PIPA laws were defeated in the U.S. just months ago, and already the forces for internet control are back. Up for vote this week, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would override all privacy laws so that private companies (like ISPs) can share all information with the U.S. government. No warrants or other authorization required. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) points out the problems with this law. Like SOPA and PIPA, the privacy issues and monitoring could reach far beyond U.S. borders.