Adam Scheinberg Archive

Review: Xandros Desktop 3 Deluxe

There's always a lot of excitement when a major Linux distribution has a new release - there's the clamour for the release notes and changelog, as well as the insatiable urge for screenshots and the search for the torrent for the ISOs. The release of Xandros Desktop 3.0 last week was no exception, with OS fanatics everywhere curious just what was in store. Read on for details.

LSE/OS A new nanokernel

A new kernel for an OS caled LSE/OS was developed by a french research laboratory: Epita System Laboratory. This laboratory is specialized in low-level system programming.For more than one year this laboratory has been developing an extremely stable nanokernel with specific features that place it in a very special class of systems. Read on for more. Update: English version here.

DragonFlyBSD: Scheduler Revision Plans

As seen on kerneltrap.org: "In response to a question raised on the dragonfly-kernel mailing-list, Matt Dillon gives an overview of plans to revise the DragonFly userland scheduler, the second of two schedulers that Dragonfly currently utilizes in a layered fashion. Matt explains, 'There are actually two schedulers.. there's the LWKT scheduler, which is as close to perfect as its possible to be, and there is the userland scheduler, which is the one that needs work.'"

Improvements in SELinux

James Morris, one of the core SELinux developers has a blog entry detailing the evolution of SELinux and how it has worked so far including a recent major performance boost using RCU (Read Copy Update) code in the Linux kernel.

KDE 3.3.2 Released

"The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.3.2, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes." Read the full announcement here, or download it here."

XAMPP: Easy Integrated Development

Open source stacks such as XAMPP from Apache Friends are simplifying open source development by making it easier to write and distribute applications in a stable and standardized environment. The trend of combining Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl into integrated middleware stacks promises to make open source development more competitive with J2EE application development, at least for low-end applications. Our Take: I use XAMPP nearly every day, at home and at work, as a testbed. It's one of my top three essential open source apps, and - by far - one of the easiest to use.

A Humble Framework for SkyOS

Follow the development of a native SkyOS application from the ground up in the first 5 chapters of Pig!. This tutorial is for both C++ beginners and experts, and illustrates a variety of design topics such as message dispatching, error handling via exceptions, and auto-destruct GUI widgets, all with source code examples. The Pig! application is based on the Humble Framework: a rapidly growing class library of C++ classes that is intended to help programmers get a 'head start' on creating native SkyOS applications; this framework is fully documented, open source, and currently contains over thirty unique classes, with more on the way.

XINS 1.0.0 released

After 2 years of development, there is now a BSD-licensed web services technology that competes with the allegedly overcomplex Microsoft SOAP technology: XINS. XINS is heavily based on Java and XML. Main design goals include simplicity, scalability and testability. Features include transaction logging, log documentation, and automatic generation of HTML docs, test forms, client-side and server-side code. A comprehensive user guide is available.

Build Grid Portals with Grid Portal Toolkit 3

The Grid Portal Toolkit (GridPort) is a toolkit for developing Web-based portals and applications on top of an underlying distributed and grid computing infrastructure. GridPort aggregates grid services from grid software packages and provides additional grid capabilities while presenting a simple, consistent API for portal and application developers. This article presents an introduction to Grid Portal Toolkit 3, including the design philosophy, architecture, and capabilities of each component.