Eugenia Loli Archive

The LinuxBIOS Project "now have a completely free software replacement for the BIOS that supports (without modification) either LILO or GRUB as bootloaders, and Linux, OpenBSD, and Windows 2000 as operating systems". FreeBSD, Win98 and WinXP support are in the works. See announcement here.

"IBM WebSphere 5.0 features SOAP parsing, UDDI repository, Java and a number of open source technologies that IBM claims speeds performance of Web services and lowers integration costs. The application server also simplifies management through features IBM claimed are part of its nascent autonomic computing strategy for self-healing of systems. These features include ability to detect and correct faults and automated server clustering." Read the report at TheRegister.

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

Active Data Recovery Software has released the NTFS Reader for DOS, a DOS-interfaced freeware application for reading NTFS volumes from MS-DOS or Windows 9x environments.

AMD said on Tuesday that it would embrace a strategy of developing processors for a wider range of products outside computers and called on the industry to focus on user needs rather than creating "technology for technology's sake." Our Take: In the last year it has been made clear that AMD could no longer outpace Intel in the MHz, speed and power consumption race of PC CPUs. Even the highest end models of the new AMD Opteron and its desktop version, Athlon64, which are to have a modern 64-bit core, according to SPEC benchmarks they will not be the speed leaders by the time they will come out (Q2 2003), bringing AMD to yet another race against Intel's Xeons/P4s. Oh well, shift happens.

BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs.

This and subsequent chapters in this book introduce you to Web services available on Mac OS X. The toolkits and frameworks, including Apple’s WebServicesCore.framework, a client-side framework for accessing Web services from Mac OS X which is new in Mac OS X version 10.2, are discussed in Chapter “Tasks”. Some of the tools and techniques for writing Web services glue and adding it to Cocoa, Carbon and AppleScript applications are also discussed.

This document details the configuration, hardening, monitoring and vulnerability assessment of the Solaris OE. It can also be used as a configuration standard, providing a baseline to audit against.

Build 63 of Lycoris is released. Printing and automounting is mostly, but not completely, fixed in this beta. Joseph Cheek's changelog: "removed ghostscript-doc; added Fontmap to ghostscript-fonts; upgraded gimp-print to 4.2.3; updated espgs to 7.05.5; added automake-compat rpm ; fixed courier only font printing issues; made kicker clock 14 pt; removed lucent wavelan from prism2 probe list; fixed non-root vfat mounting issue; fixed printing." Download here, report bugs here.

"For this preview, I had originally written a long-winded backgrounder about the history of Longhorn, and the ways in which this project has changed over time. I'll save the lengthy exposition for a future review, however, and get right to the point: Longhorn is now considered a major Windows release by Microsoft, and early alpha builds are now testing at the company's Redmond campus. Last month, some of those builds leaked to the Internet, causing a stir in the Windows enthusiast community. I take a look at one of those builds here." Read the preview and view screenshots at WinSuperSite.

James Gosling, the father of Java and a fellow at Sun Microsystems Inc., graced the Software Development Conference and Expo East 2002 with his presence this week, addressing a wide range of issues from Sun's software strategy to Web services to embedded Java to open-source software.

miray Software introduces the new version 0.95 of the operating system µnOS with numerous new features today: µnOS is now based on a completely new realtime microkernel, has a graphics server with a software graphic engine and full true color support (VESA) and a window server with a complete GUI component framework and support for arbitrary freeform windows. You can easily try the OS as it fits on a floppy disk (didn't run on my VMWare 3.x though).

"Microsoft is playing wait-and-see with AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. The company has no definite commitment to ship a version of its .Net Server operating system for the new processor, though both will be available at the same time, around April of 2003. The stance was laid out at Microsoft's IT Forum event in Copenhagen on Thursday by Microsoft's Windows supremo." Read the report at ZDNet.UK. AMD does have samples of Windows 64bit for their new processors though.

"For years, Microsoft has argued that servers containing only a handful of processors are good enough for most of the world. But now, with the advent of huge Intel machines and the approaching release of a new version of Windows that will run on them, the company is changing its tune. For heavyweight business computing jobs such as housing a large company's sales transaction database, Microsoft's preferred philosophy has been to share the load among lower-end servers grouped into a "cluster". It's been a tough sell, however, with large corporations sticking with mainframes or Unix servers." Read the report at News.com.