Eugenia Loli Archive

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Builder AU recently caught up with RMS about his achievements, the Free Software movement and his concerns with the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement. He will be in Australia on October 5 to speak at the Builder Conference in Sydney.

Gartner will officially announce figures that show Linux has shipped on 5% of all PCs worldwide in 2004. It expects that figure to grow to 7.5% by 2008, but is quick to point out that this is not necessarily a representative figure of the number of Linux PCs being used. The company estimates that perhaps 2% of all PCs shipped worldwide this year will actually be used with Linux, with that figure growing to 3.5% by 2008. Not every PC that ships with a version of Linux continues to run with that, noted Gartner.

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.3 Beta 2. The focus of this release, code-named Kollege, is to fix bugs in the run-up to aKademy in late August. More here and here.

The OpenBSD Project released OpenBSD 3.5 exactly on schedule on May 1, adding support for new functions and devices in the kernel and updating the base system. While it may not be the most versatile operating system in the world, OpenBSD shines when it comes to security, providing a default installation that doesn't have to be locked down and partially disabled before using it. Here's also another article on how to setup OpenBSD.

Linux can learn valuable lessons from its elder cousins in the enterprise, the proprietary Unixes from the likes of IBM, Sun, and HP. Those operating systems, in turn, can learn some lessons from Linux. Comparing the features of the more enterprise-ready Linux distros with AIX, one of the leading proprietary Unixes, helps identify some.

"Many people note that 2007/8 is so far away that without an excellent crystal ball, nobody could predict what the update will contain. But one thing I reckon for certain about Longhorn is that it will be able to run Linux software." Read the article at VNUNet.

Several new security-promoting technologies are to be built into Longhorn. These include an ability to periodically check user's systems against new security fixes in a centralized patch database, and to institute far more stringent access controls and permission levels. Read the article here.

Miguel de Icaza posted a list of areas that we are working on for the Mono 1.2 release. Mono 1.0 has been fairly stable, they will likely issue a bug fix release in the next couple of weeks.

Since the release of PHP5 a lot of interest has reverberated down through the whole PHP community. In particular, there's a call for a PHP-GTK 2.0 which will utilize GTK2 and will have an entire rewrite of it from the ground up to make use of new features.

The classic graphical user interface was well suited to an early Macintosh with 128kB of RAM that ran a few applications and about 50 files, "but it doesn’t scale", says usability design specialist Don Norman. With those few tasks the GUI was a boon. "You didn’t have to remember anything, because you could see everything. Now making everything visible doesn’t work. The space gets too crowded." As a logical consequence of this, the all-purpose computer should become obsolete, he says.

Producing digital music with RISC OS is still possible, says artist Antius, who this month told drobe.co.uk that he's finished recording his latest album, in which RISC OS played a considerable part. Conceived under the hEgelian diAlectics project, the album is due to be mastered at Eevolute, although no specific release date can be given.

A Windows Installer that includes Mono 1.0, GTK# 1.0, gtk+ 2.24, and XSP is now available. XSP is Mono web server that serves ASP.NET web pages. No support for Apache on Windows due to mod_mono uses unix sockets. However, a future release of Mono, XSP, and mod_mono will support Apache on Windows via TCP/IP sockets.

Six months after purchasing a Castle Iyonix, drobe.co.uk writer Martin Hansen recounts his experiences with RISC OS 5 and his new XScale powered hardware, serving an illustration of life with the latest generation of RISC OS machines.

This is the third installment of our "Inside Tiger" series, covering Mac OS X Version 10.4. Check back frequently for more Tiger coverage. Click here to jump right to the images.