Eugenia Loli Archive

"Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and Windows Vista are two state-of-the-art desktop operating systems. I got this Bi-OS laptop (with Feisty and Vista Business) recently as my desktop replacement. I compare some features of Vista vs. Feisty. Both operating systems have made great progress. Laptop is well built and great for a consultant like me (albeit tad heavy)." More here.

Mayank Sharma from Linux.com tries Mandriva 2007 Spring on several machines. He finds the distro to be very stable, sporting a good package selection, just the documentation a bit sparse.

The Gentoo Release Engineering project is pleased to announce the much-delayed release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named 'Secret Sauce'. This release met with several delays due to an abnormally high number of security vulnerabilities in large packages which had to be rebuilt using the newer, secure versions of the packages. Update: Screenshots!

Vernor Vinge, 62, is a pioneer in artificial intelligence, who in a recent interview warned about the risks and opportunities that an electronic super-intelligence would offer to mankind. Vinge is a retired San Diego State University professor of mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is well-known for his 1993 manifesto, "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology means a point will be reached where the consequences are unknown. Vinge still believes in this future, which he thinks would come anytime after 2020.

To celebrate the 1000th article of the magazine Obligement, Carl Sassenrath returns through this long interview on its origins at Amiga Inc. in the 1980's (Manager of AmigaOS and Amiga CDTV system development, among others), the bankruptcy of Commodore, its passages at Apple Computer and Viscorp, Amiga NG, or on its new revolutionary language REBOL. A classic name in the Silicon Valley!

Remember the 'Minority Report' scenes in which Tom Cruise and others used their hands to manipulate data on giant computer screens? One man is on a mission to make that gestural interface technology commonplace on every desktop.

"OpenBSD 4.1 has just been released. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed several developers to discuss some of the new features for networking, active porting efforts (landisk and UltraSPARC III), work on SMP, and the improvements in spam fighting." More here.

"The news that Dell will begin making the fast-growing Ubuntu flavor of Linux available on some of its machines should be welcomed by consumers everywhere." Read the rest of the review here.

eComStation has gotten a new VESA video driver and full ACPI support. The developers are working on user interface improvement as well. "In the beginning of the spring we updated: ACPI subsystem, eComStation kernel, USB Tools homepage, Hardware database, General Network Utilities, PMDownloader, eSchemes gallery, Panorama video drivers, Piano Launchpad and Imagination, Calculator for millionaire, Firewall ports setup, LANGE library." Screenshots can be found here.

GNU/Fiwix is a 32-bit x86 operating system kernel based on the Unix architecture and fully focused on being Linux compatible. It is designed exclusively for educational purposes, so the kernel code is kept as simple as possible for the benefit of students. In the latest version, the virtual memory manager code has been improved to support SVGAlib-based applications and to add the ability to mmap() physical addresses. The way to map physical addresses in the /dev/mem driver has been improved. The mmap() and readpage() methods have been added to the VFS structure. Among other improvements in the VFS layer, the code to build with gcc 4.x has been fixed.

Dino Dai Zovi, the New York-based security researcher who took home USD b10000 in a highly-publicized MacBook Pro hijack on April 20, has been at the center of a week's worth of controversy about the security of Apple's operating system. In an e-mail interview with Computerworld, Dai Zovi talked about how finding vulnerabilities is like fishing, the chances that someone else will stumble on the still-unpatched bug, and what operating system - Windows Vista or Mac OS X - is the sturdiest when it comes to security.

This article examines aspects of threading and synchronization that an implementation of the Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ) must support.

"After looking around and playing with Ubuntu 7, it's safe to say that the features, ease of use and stability of this distro may be enough to edge Linux desktops into corporate offices. Given that Ubuntu supports a VMWare-like environment, you can bet that Ubuntu will crop up in many test labs as well." More at EarthWeb.

Microsoft Australia has defended the company's User Account Control (UAC) system as being "misunderstood" and said it should be the type of technology that all operating systems aspire towards.