Archive

Using Git with Vim

I recently started using Git for my local revision control. Since I spend about 90% of my coding time inside the Vim editor, I went looking for a plugin that would make Vim play nice with Git. In this article I present two different vim plugins and explore their feature-set via screenshots.

Programming a 64-bit Operating System

IanOS is an experimental 64-bit operating system written from scratch as a learning experience. The source code is available online and the creator of the OS has made some detailed documentation available to go with the source code. This is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to venture into writing a 64-bit OS. The author makes his intention about this OS clear "I never had any intention of producing a true OS. There are plenty of those about and it would be a very foolish, or vain, person who thought that they could compete with the likes of FreeBSD and Linux. But my interest in computers isn't practical; I just find programming them, particularly at this level, to be a supremely satisfying intellectual pursuit".

Lunascape 5: World’s First Hybrid Engine Browser

Lunascape5 Genesis is a feature rich browser that brings the best of everything in the browser world. It is the world's first triple engine browser that gives users the freedom to choose between Trident (IE engine), Gecko or Webkit. The beta version of the browser was released today and it is available for download from their official website. In addition to offering three different rendering engines, the company blog announced that Lunascape5 has emerged as a winner in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark outperforming IE8 (alpha), FF3.1 (beta), Google Chrome and Opera 10 (alpha). We also have a short interview with the CEO of Lunascape Inc, Mr. Hidekazu Kondo.

Nix Fixes Dependency Hell on All Linux Distributions

A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not interfere with existing package managers. Unlike existing package managers, Nix allows different versions of software to live side by side, and permits sane rollbacks of software upgrades.

Microsoft Releases Its First-Ever iPhone Application

Microsoft's first-ever iPhone application is a slick photo viewer with a browsing capability that handles a large number of photos on a mobile device screen. The Seadragon mobile application is free through Apple's application store. It a product of Microsoft's Live Labs division, which focuses on developing Web-based technology and applications. Seadragon incorporates the Deep Zoom feature, which is also integrated into Silverlight 2, Microsoft's multimedia tool. It allows a user to quickly magnify a particular area of a photo, regardless of its size.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 Released

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has been released. In addition to improvements in ZFS, DTrace, IPS (the new OpenSolaris package manager) and the other OpenSolaris specialties, it also ships with a host of other OSS goodies: Gnome 2.24, Firefox 3, CherryPy, MySQL, DTrace for Ruby and many more. This new release targets developers and desktop users as well as traditional server roles. Download the live cd and give it a spin. Release notes here.

Good OS Announces Cloud

Good OS, a company well-known for it gOS linux distribution and their $199 Walmart computers has announced a new OS called "Cloud". Good OS described their new Operating System in a press release "Cloud uniquely integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the computer from inside the browser."

openSUSE Bids Good-Bye to EULA

openSUSE is adopting a new license which is based on the the license used by Fedora. The new license will be used for the release of openSUSE 11.1 . "Users no longer need to agree to the license. This is not an EULA, it's a license notice," says Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager. This is an effort make openSUSE easy to re-distribute and make modifications. To learn more about what is new in openSUSE 11.1 check out this review of the 11.1 beta4 release.

EeePC Return Rate is Similar for Windows and Linux

Last month we covered an article titled, "MSI: Wind Doing Well, Linux Version Not So Much" which revealed that Linux MSI Wind netbooks saw a return rate upto four times higher than the Windows equivalent. But in a recent interview with the CEO of Asus he revealed that Linux and Window versions of Asus Eee PC have similar return rates. He also described the plans for 2009 and talked about some changes to come in the Operating System for the netbooks.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) Possibly in Q1 2009?

From MacRumors: "Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at LISA '08 last week. This year's conference invited Apple's Jordan Hubbard to speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms". The presentation slides (PDF), besides generally interesting info on Mac OS X, feature a table that shows a release date of Q1 2009 for OS X 10.6 Leopard.

Nvidia Announces “Personal Supercomputer”

Nvidia and partners are offering new "personal supercomputers" for under $10,000. Nvidia, working with several partners, has developed the Tesla Personal Supercomputer, powered by a graphics processing unit based on Nvidia's Cuda parallel computing architecture. Computers using the Tesla C1060 GPU processor will have 250 times the processing power of a typical PC workstation, enabling researchers to run complicated simulations, experiments and number crunching without sharing a supercomputing cluster.

Etoile 0.4 Released

The new 0.4 version of Etoile had just been released. Etoile intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. 0.4 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included.

Java ME on Android

"Each new software platform, including Android, at the beginning is struggling with a small number of the available applications. This is why Google spent $10 million trying to attract developers to their Android Developer Challenge before G1 phone release. Taking advantage of an opportunity to run large number of existing Java ME applications may determine a significant value for the Android platform. This is also occasion for developers to reduce cost preparing mobile software for a smaller number of platforms at the same time. MicroEmulator, which is pure Java implementation of Java ME API's in Java SE, seems to be very well suited for the Android."

Fennec: Mobile Browser from Mozilla

Mozilla's latest browser "Fennec", specifically designed for mobile devices has finally been released. Currently, it is only available for the Nokia N810 platform. Support for other platforms is planned for the future. Ars Technica has a review of the new browser. If you are interested in getting involved, but don't have a Nokia N810, you can install it on your desktop (Windows, Linux and OS X) and experiment with it.

Krusader: One File Manager to Rule Them All

"Krusader is a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager. If you dislike bloat and prefer minimalist windows managers like XFCE or Fluxbox, the good news is that Krusader will run without KDE, provided you have the necessary libraries installed. If Dolphin isn't cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you've been looking for." Here is the download page for Krusader, give it a spin and share your comments.