Adam Scheinberg Archive

LinuxInstall.org 1.4 was released today, a distribution built for Linux newbies and those who like a clean pre-configured install by default. Screenshots can be found here, read on for the release notes.

As seen on the yellowTab website: "JavaScriptCore and WebCore are two technologies, ported from Apple's work on KHTML (the engine from Konqueror, a "modern Net+" for Linux's KDE), by YellowTab. These components will allow both developers and users to take advantage of the latest technology available, in their everyday Zeta usage." The article can be found here.

"Can Macintosh software run on an Intel machine at speeds that approach the same performance as on Apple hardware, or visa versa? Not yet, but that day may be closer if a Los Gatos start-up gets its product off the ground, and it could have implications for chip makers." Read the rest at siliconvalley.com.

Jasper writes: "I thought you might be interested to know we have just released the first release candidate for XFce 4.0. This is meant to become 4.0 unless important bugs are found." You can view the announcement, release notes and you can download it directly. Also, check out the screenshots.

SCO CEO Darl McBride has travelled to Japan to conduct a series of coversations with Japanese companies in an effort to share his views on Linux, presumably to convince them to hold off on any Linux implemenations. Yahoo has the article.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded FreeBSD RC1 for i386, he says that alpha RC1 is in the works. Kris Kennaway has uploaded i386 packages. Marcel Moolenaar is working on RC1 ia64, ISOs for which will be available sometime tomorrow. You can find RC1 at one of your preferred mirror sites.

It appears that proprietary SCO code may not be present in the Linux kernel after all. MozillaQuest magazine has done some research and determined that SCO's claims may not include violations in the official Linux kernel. Read more at MozillaQuest. Update by ELQ: Many SCO-related articles today:

According to the Free Software Foundation, free software includes "the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits... Access to the source code is a precondition for this." While I agree that the principles of the FSF are noble, I also feel that there is an unspoken assumption - an assumption that pods of hobby developers across the world can coordinate on the same scale that directed companies with a budget can. Where free software has an important place in computing, so does closed-source commercial software.

Mozilla.org has finally released version 0.6 of Firebird, the project formerly known as Phoenix. Version 0.6 includes a new theme as well as a host of new features. It can be downloaded from here.

Frank writes "IBM has a new eServer Linux Test Drive program. It enables ISV's the ability to test drive Linux on all IBM eServer platforms. It's no-charge access(14 to 30 days) to the eServer iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, or its mainframe zSeries. ISV's can choose Turbolinux, SuSE, or Red Hat to develop, port, and or test drive their solutions on IBM's eServers running IBM's middleware, and the e-business developers' toolkit based on Linux."

Holger Benl writes "Sun's Java site has a very informative article about the most important new language features planned for J2SE 1.5 (expected beta-release: late 2003). Looks like Java may finally replace C++ as my favorite programming language."

Lately, we've all read a lot of articles about desktop Linux - so many that it's getting hard to tell them apart. One says "Why Linux Sucks," the next "My Success With Linux." Even Michael Robertson of Lindows.com joined the fun with his "Why Desktop Linux Sucks, Today." But very few people have proposed anything radical, and I believe that's what's needed to take GNU/Linux to the next level.

Frank writes "Performance breakthroughs seem to come in two varieties: easy and hard. That's no platitude; the boundary between the two is surprisingly clear. Although in some cases it has taken considerable genius to realize their first application, they're easy to understand. The other kind involve careful measurement, specific knowledge, and a fair amount of tuning. Good programmers can operate in either the "hard" or "easy" mode. This article offers a paired collection of 4 hard and easy tales from real (programming) life."

Ryan Grier was the first of many to submit the news about the next public beta of Apple's Safari browser. Safari can be downloaded here or via OS X's Software Update. Update: On other browser news, Epiphany for GNOME 0.5 was released, while this week is the 10th anniversary of the release of the first graphical browser, Mosaic.