David Adams Archive

In preparation for the upcoming FOSDEM confrerence, organizers have posted interviews with Jonathan Corbet, author of the reference book "Writing Linux Device Drivers" and Denis Oliver Kropp, one of the main developers for the DirectFB project, two of the planned participants.

Novell has filed for registered copyright of several versions of UNIX that it once exercised domain over. This includes some of the same code that SCO is claiming ownership of. With Novell flexing its Linux muscle, and SCO redoubling its efforts, this could mean a future showdown between the two companies.

According to their website, Xandros 2.0 is now shipping. The site also states that "Users with high-speed connections can purchase and download both the Deluxe and Standard editions of Xandros Desktop 2 at www.xandros.com", but their download section still states "Xandros Desktop OS is not currently available for download." Supposedly they will also have a free, 30-day evaluation version available for download.

Data-storage giant EMC Corp. will buy VMware for $635 million. VMWare is the leading vendor of "virtual hardware infrastructure," which allows data center managers to partition servers (and desktops) into seperately-managed parts. VMWare is also important for the OS community because it helps a user run several OSes simultaneously on one machine. EMC's acquisition will certainly steer the product even more toward the enterprise space. Wonder what will happen to the workstation product?

For all of you who plan to use the web for your holiday shopping, I wanted to let you know that we made some updates to the OSNews Price Comparison Shop. As always, you can find it on the left side of the site, under the ad or at osnews.pricegrabber.com. We now have a search field that will take you directly to a comparison of prices for the item that you enter. If you can't find what you're looking for at PG, you may want to try NewMobileComputing's Price Comparison, which is powered by Dealtime.

An article at the register speculates that new consoles from Sony and Microsoft will be announced in Spring 2004. The speculation is that Microsoft may be planning on giving some details about its new console at the Game Developers Conference in March, but that Sony may try to steal their thunder by also giving details on the upcoming PS3.

Byte's "Serving with Linux" columnist Moshe Bar writes a brief review of his new G5, the new 15" Powerbook & Panther. Read more for some feedback on the article from contributor Diganta Saha.

From Internetnews: "Shares of Sun jumped 10% after hours Monday on news that the company will help build a nationwide standard desktop software system in China. Sun said the China Standard Software Co. (CSSC) will use Sun's Java Desktop System as the foundation for standard desktop development and deployment in the People's Republic of China. CSSC is a consortium of Chinese technology companies backed by the Chinese government to produce a nationwide standard desktop software system, and Sun said it is now the CSCC's preferred technology partner for reaching this goal."

Several hours ago, the FreeBSD team quietly released FreeBSD 4.9, the next version in the 4.x stable series. It features support for a number of new NICs, an improved ipfw, PAE support (allowing up to 64GB of RAM) and numerous other enhancements. Desktop users will be pleased to know that GNOME 2.4 and KDE 3.1.4 are included. Changelog here, mirrors here.

It looks like the G3's days are over, as Apple announced today new iBooks and eMacs with a range of enhancements, including G4 processors. The new machines also sport Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, and slot-loading combo drives. All models ship with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). The 12" iBook gets a 800Mhz G4 while the 14" models get a choice of 933Mhz or 1Ghz. The eMac is 1 Ghz.

Wired has an interesting story on a PCI card from ClearSpeed technologies which contains "a processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops. ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop)." Such a PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, but only cost about $25,000.

There's a review of FreeBSD 5.1 at The Jem Report. It's a comprehensive review and offers a quick comparison with GNU/Linux.

Earlier in the month we made a call for contributions, and we had an overwhelming response. Hopefully we'll be seeing some new articles from OSNews readers in the near future. I'd like to announce that we've set up a mailing list for those readers who might be interested in contributing articles and reviews. I'd also like to make a public apology to those people who I mistakenly added to the list. "Read more" for details.

Macdevcenter has an overview of the features and benefits of Mac OS X 10.3. The essential question is asks is "Should I upgrade?" and it answers "yes."