Eugenia Loli Archive

Networking software giant Novell Inc does not have any plans to change anything in the Linux operating system from its recently-acquired SuSE AG ... at least, not in the medium term. "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own," said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region.

Windows Services for Unix 3.5, which is currently in beta testing and will be officially launched next week at the LinuxWorld Expo, is updated for the latest round of Windows offerings, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

Progress looks to have been picking up for the Unununium OS, where dietlibc has been ported and much work has continued in all areas including the file system, thread engine, memory manager, graphic device support, network stack as well as the build and documentation system. A new release is 'imminent'.

When new operating systems gets designed today, great systems such as Amiga, Atari and VMS, seems to get overlooked in regard to their original features not found on other OSes. It might be time to collect and categorize those special unique features under the great/lost ideas wiki, so new OSes don't have to re-invent the wheel and re-innovate.

This article discusses how to get your FreeBSD system to act as a NetFlow probe exporting records to a collector. Elsewhere, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long says that at the September DevSummit, Peter Wemm proposed changing the device driver API so that interrupt routines return an INT instead of a VOID, while FreeBSD's Greg Lehey discusses the future of Vinum and GEOM on FreeBSD. Greg says that with the advent of GEOM, there may be some overlap with the features and functionality offered by Vinum. On the other hand, GEOM and Vinum do some things not only differently but in an incompatible manner.

XP Pro SP2 seems to support conncurrent use of XP via remote desktop and via console. (previously only a single session was possible on XP). If you run XP sp2 beta 1, you can enable it now, the setting taken from win2k3 enables it for WinXP Pro-SP2.

RadiOS is a microkernel-based operating system written entirely in the i386 assembly language (NASM). It uses many ideas and implementation techniques from VSTa and QNX.

Castle Technology Ltd and Tematic Limited confirmed that Castle and Tematic merged in the fourth quarter of 2003. The combined business will trade under the Castle Technology Ltd name with a new "Tematic Division", focused on offering full design and engineering resources to customers wishing to licence RISC OS for use in their new products.

Metrowerks Senior Software Engineer and veteran real-time programmer Bernhard Kuhn has created a Linux kernel patch that he claims enables hard, real-time performance in the Linux kernel by adding priorities to interrupts and spinlocks. Kuhn believes his approach to be more "natural" and akin to traditional real-time operating systems (RTOSs) than the dual-kernel approach taken by real-time projects such as RTAI and RTLinux, and he is hopeful that his patch might one day win enough interest and support to become part of the official Linux kernel tree.

The first place many companies look for Apache support is their main distribution provider, most commonly Red Hat or SuSE. As open source grows, the need for support grows, and this new need has led to the development of a new support option: third-party vendors who manage or patch software. Flaws raise red flag on Linux security but many users remain confident about the security of the open-source environment notices ComputerWorld.

Devices will be size of a handheld, have a hard drive, Wi-Fi and VGA display, vendor claims. A new type of mobile device that is barely larger than a standard handheld but runs Windows XP on an i86 processor was unveiled this week at the CES. Vendors said the device, which they are dubbing the ultra-personal computer (UPC), will be available in the second half of this year. Development of the device is being encouraged by Transmeta, which has a line of i86-compatible processors that is small enough and has sufficient heat dissipation to be put into devices without cooling fans.

Two Linux distributors from China and Japan are building a common open-source platform for Asian companies. China's Red Flag Software and Japan's Miracle Linux aims to develop a common Linux platform to make it easier for Asian companies to switch to the open-source camp. The two Linux distributors said in a statement they will make use of Oracle's software development centre in Beijing to jointly create a new Linux-based server operating environment called "Asianux".

Roberto Alsina writes: "Tired of long, carefully crafted tutorials trying to show you the quickest way to write a program? Here I take another approach. I just went and did a program (and the tutorial) while checking the clock." And so here you have it: the app, the tutorial, and the timeline.

Linus Torvalds released the final 2.6.1 Linux kernel. This release has a lot of changes since 2.6.0, many things have been merged from the -mm tree. This release includes a patch for the mremap() vulnerability.