Eugenia Loli Archive

Intel is expected to release on Monday development tools designed to help programmers at software companies take advantage of the added computing power available on multicore systems.

Debian has without much fanfare released the beta 3 of Etch, the final release slated to take place sometime this year. This review looks at what Debian has for the Linux enthusiast with its latest offering.

Do you think design patterns are academic nonsense, useless and elitist? If this is how you feel, the aim in this chapter is to show you the opposite, because nothing could be more wrong.

Ubuntu is developing the "upstart", a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system. The article compares upstart to Solaris SMF, Apple's launchd, and initng.

In this final installment on testing of the three part series, Brian Goetz examines another technique for smoking out bugs that violate design rules: aspects. The first two installments in this series, Part 1 covering testing in integrated frameworks and Part 2 on testing with leverage, show how static analysis tools like Find Bugs can provide greater leverage in managing software quality by focusing on entire categories of bugs rather than on specific bug instances.

Vista will be the last version of Windows that exists in its current, monolithic form, according to Gartner. Instead, the research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced to migrate Windows to a modular architecture tied together through hardware-supported virtualisation. "The current, integrated architecture of Microsoft Windows is unsustainable - for enterprises and for Microsoft," wrote Gartner analysts Brian Gammage, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith.

What's particularly compelling about the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is that it's not only the first to be billed as an "Internet Tablet," but also its software is built entirely from open source components. Parts of it come as a result of direct community participation via the Nokia 770's community site. Somewhere between a PDA and a laptop, Nokia's 770 uses software built entirely from open source components.

David Beers was in attendance at LinuxWorld San Francisco where PalmSource was exhibiting the Access Linux Platform. PalmSource also held a full day of hands-on tutorials in which they built and debugged native applications for mobile Linux. In this article David brings us up to date on ALP, its progress and other details on and what was being presented about ALP at LinuxWorld.

Learn all the functional and technical details you need to design your clustering solution for Linux and NetWare. Sander van Vugt and Rob Bastiaansen cover the key topics and also provide practical tips on setting up clustering for applications that do not require shared storage.

"If we want open source software to take off on the desktop, we need to reduce the amount of choice and concentrate our efforts into a single app for each purpose. Choice is one of the drawcards of open source software, but if it is ever to receive adoption at any recognisable level on the desktop, there needs to be less of it. More is less and less is more." More here.

IronPython is the code name of the new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET and Mono. The latest version, 1.0-RC2 was just released. Changelog here.

"The DS Browser ends up becoming a bullet point for the Nintendo DS system's capabilities. Yes, the Nintendo DS can now surf the internet. But after the novelty wears off, you probably won't want to", Craig Harris writes in his review. Craig was very kind to send us a DS screenshot rendering the mobile version of OSNews, although the browser seems to interpret "100%" of cell width as 800px wide instead of DS' 256px native resolution. Update: Craig sent us another shot, this time using the "small screen rendering" mode, which looked much better.

Validation reports whether a document adheres to the rules specified by the schema. Different parsers and tools support different schema languages such as DTDs, the W3C XML Schema Language, RELAX NG, and Schematron. This is a good guide to learn about this XML validation API and how Java 5 adds a uniform validation Application Programming Interface (API) that can compare documents to schemas written in these and other languages.

"It's a question that crops up with depressing regularity: Why don't Linux filesystems need to be defragmented?. Here's my attempt at answering once and for all. Rather than simply stumble through lots of dry technical explanations, I'm opting to consider that an ASCII picture is worth a thousand words." Read the explanatin here. Elsewhere, "Why is Linux Successful?"