Adam Scheinberg Archive

Castle have announced a promotional offer which will bring the cost of a RISC OS 5 computer below the £1000 UK mark for the first time ever. This will no doubt allow many more eager users to upgrade to the 32bit version of the operating system running on brand new, fast hardware.

From all of us here at OSNews, Happy New Year! 2005 promises to be an exciting year in technology - what surprises do you think this year will hold? What news do you think will top the technology news sites in 2005 - Linux? SCO? Microsoft? Firefox? Security? Wireless networking? A destructive new worm? Share your thoughts here.

Following the opening up of CVS access to contributors, the Fedora project has announced pre-extras, a preview release of the Fedora extras repository. The distributed "global filesystem," or GFS, acquired by Redhat and later open sourced, has been integrated into the Fedora development tree recently as well.

Mandrakesoft, the makers of Mandrake Linux, appear to be firmly out of the red. According to their site, "Mandrakesoft closed a 3.05 million euros increase of capital via subscription for 508,333 new shares at 6 euros per share, an increase in shares of 10.58%. Shares outstanding are now 5,312,889. The strengthened balance sheet reinforces Mandrakesoft's capacity to grow both organically and externally toward the corporate market."

Sun Microsystems is focusing on Opterons and Solaris x86 for a good reason. Sun has figured out a way to make x86 hardware cheaper than anyone else. Sun is hoping that by leveraging its cost advantages the company will be able to ensure the success of its x86 hardware and Solaris.

The Free Software Foundation Europe has responded to Microsoft's failed appeal previously discussed here.

In the new article "Developing 64-bit Applications" of the "Tiger Developer Overview Series" published on ADC, Apple states that the Cocoa and Carbon GUI application frameworks will not be ready for 64-bit programming. Even the kernel will be compiled in 32-bit address mode and will be provided in only one version for all the machines. The only 64-bit system framework which will be provided in a "fat" format will be libSystem which command-line applications, servers and computation engines will be linkable to. The 32-bit GUI clients will be capable however to communicate with the 64-bit server processes by using several IPC techniques.

Since the decision to demote ULE in favor of the 4BSD scheduler as the default for FreeBSD's 5.3-Release, many improvements to both schedulers have been committed. At the time it was marked broken, ULE was especially needy in light of the status of its maintainership, performance issues, and its unreliable nature in conjunction with threading and kernel preemption. Having resolved these problems, Jeff Roberson announces to -current that the ULE code is now in working order: More information can be found on kerneltrap.org.

The ubiquity and utility of Ant as a build tool for Java projects is virtually unsurpassed. Even Maven, the new, upstart utility in the build arena, owes much of its power to lessons learned from Ant. This article introduces Groovy's builder utility, which makes it especially easy to combine Groovy with Ant and Maven for more expressive and controllable builds.

Symantec Corp., the top global security software maker, on Thursday said it will buy Veritas Software Corp for $13.5 billion, expanding into the data storage and recovery business. More can be found just about everywhere.

David Rhodus has posted an interesting writeup about the intergration of OpenNTPD into DragonFly over at GoBSD.com.

Apple has released OS X 10.3.7 via Software Update. Improvements include improved AFP support for saving documents with long file names, improved OpenGL technology and updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, improved FireWire device compatibility, updated Preview application, improved compatibility for third party applications, and previous standalone security updates. Read more here.

It has been a while since Redhat announced the merger with Fedora.us and the formation of a community oriented and supported Fedora project. The process of opening up CVS access to the community is one of the major steps towards that and that has finally happened, according to Red Hat. The build infrastructure internally used by Redhat should open up soon and formation of fedora extras and policies would complete the process.

According to at least one company, in order for Sun to gain credibility in the Linux market, they must acquire either Red Hat or Novell. Merrill Lynch hypothesizes that with one of these companies as an asset, the Opteron market is theirs for the taking, and without one, they are doomed to cater to mostly Solaris customers.