Eugenia Loli Archive

OSNews was the first news magazine to break the story on Gnome's Seth Nickell effort to replace the Init system. Soon, it became confusing to many readers as to if Seth is planning to completely replace the Init system or simply "bridge" it. We had a chat with Seth and discussed about his plans on the project (which is a personal project so far) and for Storage, an exciting project which aims to replace the traditional filesystem with a new database-based document store.

At this week's RVC Softedge 2003 conference, a group of open source developers argued over innovation, commoditization and how the work really gets done. Among the topics: How far can "open" go in a professional development setting?

Steve Ballmer is aiming at emerging markets like China, India and Brazil to keep Microsoft on the high-growth track. He also plans on inspiring existing PCs owners to buy another one.

MirBSD is a derivative of OpenBSD. It is i386-only, and has some packages removed (Kerberos etc.). Additional features include IPv6 support in Apache, ports for djb-ware, a new bootloader and more.

Silicon Graphics Inc says that it has received notice from SCO Group Inc that the Unix vendor intends to terminate its Unix System V license on the basis that SGI has breached the terms of the license. UPDATE: SGI's letter to the Open Source Community.

OpenOffice.org 1.1 is released and it brings a lot of new features.

Version 3.0 of SnapGear Embedded Linux, based on Linux kernel 2.6, is now available for free download. The latest SnapGear security-oriented embedded Linux distribution is claimed to be the "world's first production Linux system powered by the 2.6 kernel" -- but is also a watershed release in that for the first time, commercial developers can use a stable Linux kernel distribution, without patching, to build deeply embedded systems on devices without a memory management unit (MMU).

Microsoft released Windows XP MCE 2004 today. Winsupersite published a review of Microsoft's new MCE. To coincide with todays launch of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, Microsoft has also posted a few new PowerToys: "Alarm Clock" and "Playlist Editor" PowerToys.

FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). To-do for 4.9 is here. Also, Robert Watson posted another FreeBSD 5.2 "Open Issues" list, still containing 18 "must resolve issues" before 5.2 will be released.

Microsoft is used to winning; Now CEO Steve Ballmer is trying to win some friends.

In the dawn of the renovation of freedesktop.org's web site, David Zeuthen announced the release of HAL 0.1. HAL is an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer, as defined by Havoc Pennington's paper. It encompasses a shared library for use in applications, a daemon, a hotplug tool, command line tools and a set of stock device info files. Carlos Perelló Marín also announced the design of a similar concept, but it is expected the two projects to merge. More people are encouraged to join this innovative project. Elsewhere, Gnome's Seth Nickell is giving us a first taste of his effort to replace the Init system.

Session 20 of the Fortnightly Questions and Answers sessions with Amiga's Chief Technology Officer Fleecy Moss are now online.

Linux distributor SuSE said last week that future versions of the open source operating system may arrive at a slower rate, a move designed to increase stability for users. UPDATE: SuSE Linux 9.0 offers sneak peek at 2.6 Linux kernel, 32/64-bit support, and easier Windows migration, the official press release says. Chris Schläger, Director of Distribution Development at SuSE, explains some details of the most important new features.

Microsoft is expected next month to disclose more details on Longhorn, its planned upgrade to Windows, as the company looks to drive demand for the forthcoming operating system. At its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the Redmond, Wash., software maker will detail Longhorn's underlying graphics and user interface technology, code-named Aero/Avalon.