Eugenia Loli Archive

On Syllable 0.4.2 there are new GUI classes, public message ports, kernel fixes, a new POSIX threads library, Daryl's new preference apps. For a full list of changes, look here, and you can download 0.4.2 here. Installation notes here. Now that Syllable 0.4.2 has fixed a bug which has previously caused Samba to fail, it means that Samba now compiles and runs. A basic precompiled binary can now be downloaded, which you can install and use once you've upgraded to 0.4.2.

There is more to OS life than just Mac, Unix and Windows. Robert Szeleney did some good work for the past few weeks, porting Quake I and II to SkyOS, GCC and binutiles and developing a text programmer's editor to help him further develop the OS on a self-hosted environment. In the meantime, Marcus Overhagen continues to develop for OpenBeOS a MediaKit clone off the original BeOS, while MenuetOS gets lots of advancements in networking lately, same as TriangleOS does (expect a new version and a kernel re-write too for this new OS). Additionally, Syllable gets a CVS freeze in preperation for version 0.4.2, while Daryl Dudey continues his truly remarkable work on Syllable's preference panels.

The basic pen-based concept of a Tablet PC isn't new. Such concepts have come and gone, with the exception of those seen in PDAs. So what gave Microsoft the confidence to succeed where other players have faltered? With the new Acer TravelMate C100 Tablet PC, HardwareZone takes a look at the fundamentals as well as the operating system behind the Tablet PC. A very intersting article with many screenshots, especially pages 2 and 3 (showing the Windows XP TabletPC Edition).

Signals are the difficult of part IRIX emulation. However, before examining the way they work on IRIX, let us study the signals implementation in NetBSD/mips. A user process enters the kernel by a trap. When a trap is caught, the hardware transfers control to the kernel. Assembly code in sys/arch/mips/mips/locore.S builds a trap frame (this is a struct frame, defined in sys/arch/mips/include/proc.h) on the kernel stack, in which CPU registers are saved. Then the trap() function from sys/arch/mips/mips/trap.c is called to handle the trap. Read the article at OnLamp.

Ramen, Slapper, Scalper and Mighty may sound like Santa's new team of reindeer, but they are creatures far lower down the evolutionary ladder -- and much less welcome. These are worms that have infiltrated Linux servers in recent months, commandeering the servers for use in distributed denial-of-service attacks. Linux enthusiasts who once believed they were less vulnerable to attack than Microsoft users have begun to wonder whether they were overly optimistic. Read the article at NewsFactor.

Microsoft and its allies have quietly expanded an effort to gain acceptance for C#, the software giant's competitor to Java and a foundation for its next-generation Internet services. Read the report at CNet.

Robin writes: Just a bit of silliness to lighten up your day: "If your school, charity or government agency is suddenly graced with a visit by Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer offering to donate a free operating system or desktop office software, Linux.com will match that offer. Our software offer has no strings attached to it whatsoever. You don't need to start paying for upgrades after a few years or anything like that. Too good to be true? Bill and Steve might think so, but we don't!"

"Since FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE in June 2002, we have updated a number of software programs in the base system, such as GCC and sendmail. Several new drivers have been added for USB devices and disk controllers. We have also incorporated updates for XFree86 and our Linux compatibility libraries. FreeBSD 4.7 also incorporates all of the security and bug fixes from 4.6.2 (released in August 2002), including several ATA-related bugfixes, updates for OpenSSL and OpenSSH, and fixes to address several security advisories." Announcement for FreeBSD 4.7 and release notes.

"Most people know of the Microsoft Windows range for the home which includes Windows 95, 98, 98 Second Edition, Millennium Edition (also know as ME) and the two XP's - Home and Pro. There are though a couple out there that not so many have heard of. Probably the better known of the two is Windows CE which is used on the majority of the PDA's on the market at the moment. The other one is Windows XP Embedded." Read the article at ActiveWin.

DistroWatch reports that Lycoris has released a new beta version of Lycoris Desktop/LX - build 53. Besides usual bug fixes, the inclusion of ALSA sound packages seems to be the only major addition. Report bugs in the Build 53 Bugs forum. Also, a couple of new products have been recently announced by Lycoris - these links will take you on a tour of the ProductivityPak and the Desktop/LX InterConnect.

The previous version of AIX, version 5.1, had static partitions, which meant administrators had to reboot after making changes to system resource utilization, Giga's Brad Day said. In a competitive move against Sun Microsystems, IBM has released new eServer software designed to let customers harness the untapped power within their Unix systems.

The KDE project just released KDE 3.0.4 for Mandrake (8.2, 9.0 and Cooker), Debian, SuSE (7.3, 8.0 and 8.1), Slackware (under the contribution dir) and TurboLinux. Read the ChangeLog here, however it is important to note that this is bugfix release. Update: Read regarding the recent KDE League issue.

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday will announce XDocs, the working code name for the latest addition to its Office desktop productivity family. Steve Ballmer, CEO of the Redmond, Wash., software company, will use the Gartner ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., to announce this latest Office application. Microsoft officials are promoting XDocs as a smart client like Office. "Think of it as a hybrid information gathering tool for organizations that blends the benefits and richness of a traditional word processing program with the data capturing ability and rigor of a forms package into the XDocs templates," Scott Bishop, an Office product manager, told eWEEK.

Arguably, the new unified UI on Red Hat 8 was the talk of the town for the whole summer since the Limbo betas. Today we talk with two of the leading people behind Red Hat's enhanced usability and UI found on 8.0-Psyche, Havoc Pennington (also known for his work on the Metacity window manager) and Owen Taylor (lots of cool stuff on XFree's side). We discuss about XFree and its capabilities, about Linux's ability to fullfil a modern desktop for every user, about the unification of Qt and GTK+ and more.