Adam Scheinberg Archive

In ever-growing numbers, CIOs want to take advantage of the many benefits that free and open-source software have to offer their companies. But there's a snag. Their lawyers can be grouchy when it comes to open-source.

Sun Microsystems initiated a warmer stage in its relationship with Red Hat on Monday, making conspicuous room onstage for the rival at a major server product launch. Sun prefers customers to use its Solaris operating system, which chiefly runs on Sun servers using UltraSparc processors. And as Sun launches its "Galaxy" line of x86 servers, the company is aggressively trying to build support for the Unix variant on computers with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices processors as well.

"Version 1.2 is the third official release of the Gentoo-based VidaLinux OS (VLOS). The changes and enhancements to this edition are significant, but not good enough to save this conceptually astute operating system from failure. VidaLinux 1.2 is nice to play with, but don't expect a comfortable, complete desktop experience a la SUSE or Mandriva." Linux.com has the details. My Take: Tested VLOS the other day, and while it may be not be perfect yet, it's definitely on the way to being an attractive and usable system.

I've just incremented the OSNews version number from 3.0 to 3.1. I'm not really sure if now is too early or too late to make this change, but some fairly large backend changes have occured recently that prompted me to revisit whether or not this is really the same site that 3.0 was at rollout. Anyway, there's a nice new feature that comes along with the change to 3.1 -- THREADING. Read on to find out about it.

I have just posted a new OSNews feature, email notification on comment reply. It's not the only change we made around here today. Read on for further details.

O'Reilly's DevCenter continues its foray into all things Vista by investigating Aero Glass, presentation broadcast tools, UAP and RDP security, and more. Here's part 1 for those of you that missed it.

An anonymous reader writes "One thing should be mentioned - the VLOS Installer is cool." Here's a review of VLOS PPC, which seems to indicate that while there are still some issues, it's certainly coming along at a nice pace.

O'Reilly's DevCenter is featuring an in-depth look at Windows Vista Beta 1. Their conclusion? "Surprisingly, this build of Windows Vista is pretty stable, and the performance is quite good."

At this week's LinuxWorld conference, Microsoft officials are slated to talk up the Services for Unix features that the company is integrating into the Windows Server 2003 R2.

ARSTechnica took a new 64 bit laptop out for a test run using Gentoo Linux. How did it fair? Just that: fair, as it turns out. Lightening fast, but with more cons than pros.

Adam Jackson has announced the availability of "the zeroth release candidate(s) of the next Xorg release(s)." The changelog is here. Before downloading, be warned, in the developers' words: "The RC number is not accidental. This is unpolished and rough, and is only just at the point where we can usefully have large numbers of people testing it and fixing things."

In a move sure to spark tons of heated "toldja so" debates, Apple has released a new mouse, Yahoo reports. Aptly named Mighty Mouse, it got a touch-sensitive top shell which works like left/right buttons, a pair of force-sensing side buttons, and a 360-degree scroll button which doubles as the third button.

It has been a big day for Sun Microsystems today, who, after announcing their largest deal ever, now report that General Electric has selected Sun's Java System Identity Manager, "the provisioning component of the Sun Java Enterprise System, across all GE business units and 450,000 users on a global scale."

Since we haven't posted anything about the new Windows Vista beta release lately... Stardock's Brad Wardell writes "I've put together a first look at the first beta of Windows Vista. In the coming days I hope to delve deep into the guts of Microsoft's new OS but I've tried to put together a decent overview of what Windows Vista is all about."