Eugenia Loli Archive

In an about-face that could have a dramatic impact in the Java tools space, Sun Microsystems Inc. has indicated it might be willing to join the IBM-sponsored Eclipse open-source development platform effort—but only if momentum to spin off the effort into an independent organization continues.

The company lands a big customer for its Power Mac G5: Virginia Tech, which will use 1,100 G5s as part of a cluster designed to make the list of the world's largest supercomputers. In the meantime, Apple delays the shipping of its dual-processor Power Mac G5 to individual consumers, opting instead to send the first of the fast desktops to schools, Europe and selected customers.

"Whether X configuration is getting you down or you need a lightweight graphics solution for that embedded app, Richard Drummond thinks SciTech has the answer." LinuxFormat's complete review is posted at SciTech's web site in PDF format.

"Forget SCO & Microsoft. The single biggest thing keeping Linux from the desktop is Linux itself. It's time to stop adding new features, and finish what's there." Read the 3-page editorial at ExtremeTech. Our Take: While there is no such thing as "finished software", as software by definition can always be improved, it is true that Linux projects (especially desktop apps) need to outline and release full-featured, solid, well tested versions of their software and offer less smaller ones that require the user to constantly upgrade and be in a state of flactuation. What is needed in smaller projects are real release engineers that can outline goals and releases wisely (the Gnome project, PostgreSQL and Apache are good on that for example, smaller projects could learn a thing or two from these bigger projects).

From Mac news site MacMinute: "Victor Kulesh today announced the release of Veta Universal Palm Edition, which will turn a Bluetooth-enabled Palm PDA into a wireless remote control for your Mac. "Now users can use their Tungsten T Palms to remotely control many applications such as iTunes, Keynote, DVD Player and even the mouse on their computers." Veta Universal Palm Edition is priced at US$10."

Aiming to provide Linux users with industry acclaimed quality network services, Conectiva, leading company in Linux services in Latin America, has just announced partnership with Novell. From now on, Novell Nterprise Linux Services, which provides file, printing, message and directory management, will be supported and run on Conectiva Linux Enterprise Edition. The agreement also provides that both Conectiva and Novell shall work in close cooperation as a team to provide service to major Nterprise Linux clients.

"Without a doubt, Linux has become fully accepted as a powerful, scalable and stable platform for enterprise deployments. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the cost of deploying Linux is getting pretty close to the cost of deploying some other enterprise platforms." Read the editorial at eWEEK.

David Holm has put together a few patches and scripts on his page and so you can find all required files to install Gentoo Linux on the Pegasos PPC platform. UPDATE: Read more for the whole press release:

"Much of what Microsoft has done over the past year or so might suggest a company settling into middle age. It has overhauled its management structure, tightened its financial controls, expanded its financial reporting, started paying dividends and abandoned the high-tech currency of stock options in favor of risk-free grants of shares to employees. " Read the story at SFGate.

The FreeDOS Project has recently released pre2 of its Beta 9 series. This is the base disk set only.

The WinNT-inspired OSS OS ReactOS released recently 0.1.3.

eCosCentric Limited, the eCos and RedBoot experts, today announced the release of the eCosPro Developer's Kit for a number of hardware platforms. Read more for the rest of the press release.

Once Linux overtakes Unix, as Aberdeen analyst Bill Claybrook predicts, Linux and Windows "will be duking it out for everything." There will be "unbelievable competition between Windows and Linux" in areas like back-end database servers, he says.

OpenBSD's Todd Miller reports that an improper bounds check in the semget(2) system call can allow a local user to cause a kernel panic. No privilege escalation is possible, the attack simply runs the kernel out of memory. The bug was introduced in OpenBSD 3.3, previous versions of OpenBSD are unaffected. Earlier, Mike Frantzen has committed "Passive operating system fingerprinting" to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language.