Eugenia Loli Archive

One of the great difficulties a hobbyist programmer faces when trying to start the development of his own OS is finding out where to start. Many books describe in-depth theoretical OS concepts, yet noone seems to take a hobyist programmer by the hand and bring him face to face with these concepts. This is precisely what this article aims at doing.

Red Hat Chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik said Microsoft's legal efforts to challenge open source by employing patent infringement law represent a big threat. "It's a credible threat, no doubt about it," said Szulik. "We see the threat of costs of litigation could be harmful, cause a disenfranchisement of the global collaborative community and disrupt the speed of innovation. Yes, I think it's quite credible." Read the report at CRN.

"Version 4 of MySQL has been in development since 2001. By the time you read this, MySQL 4.0 should be a stable release (or at least be in late-beta -- not finished yet, but still quite suitable for development work that you expect to deploy later this year)." Read the article at LinuxMag. On other database news, mSQL 3.3 was released.

"In my previous article, I introduced the C# programming language and explained how it works in the context of the Mono environment, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. I will now go on to some details on the data types supported by the C# programming language." Read the second article at LinuxGazette. Another development article ("Writing Portable Code") is here.

J. Todd Slack emailed in and asked us to inform everyone that their donations towards the FreePepper project will be returned to all who contributed. The contributions from the community were a bit above $500 USD and that was obviously not enought as $11,000 were needed to open source Pepper. "I have come up with the funds privately to buy Pepper and I will be returning everyone's donations in the next few days. I thank everyone who donated" Mr Slack said. Pepper will stay commercial and it will not be open sourced.

Software vendor Red Hat will align its workstation and server OSes to encourage the development of more applications. Another article, says that immediately after its release and apart from the usual rough edges of every .0 version, Red Hat 8.0 generated a lot of heat. Much of it came from the Bluecurve desktop and from the changes RH made to standard KDE.

KernelTrap has interviewed Ingo Molnar who has been contributing to Linux kernel development since 1995 with an impressive list of accomplishments.

Recently, a few independent departments (Solaris, java, Netscape and other middleware) at Sun Microsystems got integrated into one, the Platform/Software Group. We had a quick chat with Mr John Fowler, Sun Software's CTO about Solaris 10, Java, the competition and more.

Windows .NET Server 2003 Release Candidate 2 is released to beta testers. Upgrade or join the Customer Preview Program today and see what's new. Update: An anonymous sent us a link on Microsoft's site which describes at a high level how they migrated the entire site to .NET Server RC1. According to the article they are experiencing high levels of uptime and significant performance increase that they may even reduce the size of their cluster.

Learn the fundamentals of session beans: their characteristics and types; how instance pooling, activation, and passivation are applicable to session beans; and examine session bean methods and their life cycle diagrams. Also, Jamie Jaworski covers the fundamentals of the Java language. Learn how to create packages, import classes and interfaces from other packages, and create a program's main() method; how to access command-line variables and form identifiers; and discuss each primitive type, its range of values, and how to create literal values of each type (free reg. req).

When it issues a second Windows .Net Server 2003 release candidate, Microsoft also plans to announce a new, per-user licensing option. Plus, other tweaks are being offered. Additionally, major Longhorn revision shows AMD 64 support.

eWEEK Executive Editor/News Michael R. Zimmerman and EiC Eric Lundquist caught up with Ruiz at Comdex in Las Vegas recently for a candid conversation about AMD's challenges, its future and Intel's influence in the market. On another CPU-related interview, HP has the task of migrating its Unix customers running HP-UX on PA-RISC, as well as recently acquired Tru64 Alpha customers from Compaq, over to Intel's Itanium architecture. Making sure this transition happens smoothly in Australia is Steve Williamson who transferred from Compaq and now is business development manager in HP's business critical systems division.

"Apple picked the worst possible time to take the biggest risk imaginable. Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server are unqualified hits on everything from $999 notebooks through entry servers. Developers are climbing onto the platform in droves, as well they should. I can't say it emphatically enough: Apple is a serious player in the broad IT market now." Read the editorial at InfoWorld.

Fred Langa test-drives the latest version of LindowsOS 3.0, this Linux-based Windows work-alike operating system to see if it's ready for prime time.