Eugenia Loli Archive

"A move by four sellers of Linux to unite behind a single version of the operating system might help those allies--and boost Linux's popularity--but it isn't likely to dent the dominance of the top dog, Red Hat." Read the article at ZDNews. Update: Interesting interview with Caldera's CEO, about UnitedLinux.

"Solaris 9 for Intel could be poised to ship after all, Register spies at Sun suggest. The official line is currently that Sun is shipping Solaris 9 for Sparc, but that "Sun is deferring the productization and release of the Solaris 9 OE for Intel IA-32." In English this means that Sun has (probably) more or less finished it but is hesitating as to whether or not to ship it, while in ITspeak this sort of phrasing generally means that the product is headed for a lingering death in the netherworld." The story is at TheRegister.

"After a long break between releases, Microsoft on Tuesday issued the Windows 2000 SP3 Release Candidate, marked build 3.140. The long awaited update weighs in at 17MB and 30MB for Professional and Server versions of the operating system, respectively." Read the report at BetaNews.

"A number of Linux vendors will announce on Thursday that they have agreed to standardize on a single Linux distribution to try to take on Red Hat Inc.'s dominance in the industry. A media advisory issued on Tuesday said executives from Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux on Thursday will make 'a major announcement that will change the shape of Linux worldwide.'" Read more at eWeek.

"The most tantalising net rumour burning up the wires this week is the one about the Apple iBrowser. Heard it? It goes like this. Apple co-opts the Mozilla code base for a skunkworks native OS X browser that's both super fast and grannie-friendly. A Galeon for OS X. "iBrowser" thus completes the set of consumer software apps gradually introduced with iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie, which are being advertised under the slogan 'everything's easier on a Mac'." Read the article at TheRegister. In other browser news, Opera 6.03 for Windows and Opera 6.01 for Linux were released today.

"Support for Bluetooth has been added to the Linux development kernel, a step toward native Bluetooth support in upcoming releases of the Linux operating system." Read the report at ZDNews.

DigitalVideoEditing.com features an article listing the 10 top reasons why someone would or should use Mac over the PC, or a PC instead of a Mac for Video Editing. Update: Another one here, submitted by CattBeMac.

"The first release candidate for Slackware 8.1 is now available on ftp.slackware.com (and hopefully some mirrors by now). Recent additions to -current include Mozilla-1.0rc3, KDE-3.0.1, and gcc-3.1. This is all leading up to what we're hoping will be the best Slackware release ever!" Changelog, mirrors.

XP-Erience.org carries the news about the release of an in-game footage of Doom III. The 37 MB video is in the DivX format (captured by a camera, so the quality is not great, but it is more than enough to show the impressive lighting effects in the game). Real screenshots can be found at Avault. ExtremeTech reported that the demo was running on a Pentium4 2.2 GHz, with an unreleased ATi graphics chip, codenamed R300. In other graphics news, Microsoft has just released the SDK of DirectX 9 Beta 1 to their beta testers.

"I'm one of those people who is sacrificing a small portion of their mental health to the greater good, by testing FreeBSD-current. Now that we're approaching FreeBSD 5.0, the FreeBSD Project needs people to test -current in a wide variety of installations and environments." Read the tutorial at OReilly.

"For the software publishing industry, video games are a numbers game. And for now, Microsoft is on the losing end. That's the upshot from the Electronics Entertainment Expo, the game industry's main trade show, where new games for Microsoft's Xbox have largely been limited to "me too" titles--games already appearing on other consoles. Microsoft has said it expects to have more than 200 games for the Xbox by the end of the year, but less than two dozen of those will be exclusive Xbox titles from third-party publishers." Read the story at ZDNews.

"Sometimes it seems that Linux fanatics are the open source movement's own worst enemy. Perhaps it is time that the "revolution" started to employ a few marketing people." Read the editorial at ITWeb. Our Take: I agree with the author. There were many times that I asked articles, interviews, screenshots and other "marketing" material from maintainers of open source projects and they either never replied, or they replied... months later, or their reply was rushed and half-baked. Real companies or people who understood the importance of marketing, were truly responsive. Marketing is important, and each major open source project needs at least one good marketing/PR person.

"I understand there are several different philosophies of application development. Some people prefer GTK not because it is the better tool kit, but because the approach makes more sense to them, because GTK is more granular than Qt, prefer C to C++, or another reason. I cannot address all of these factors, but I will try to take them into account wherever they matter." Part I and Part II at LinuxWorld.

"If you have followed GNU/Linux for the last few years you know that GNOME has long been a stronghold of C, Perl and Python GUI programming. With Ximian's work on Mono, C# seems also to be a language that will see wide use in GNOME. Sun's involvement should also make Java applications integrate strongly with GNOME. But what about C++? Even in the GNU/Linux and Unix world this language has received many advocates and developers. I sat down with Murray Cumming, lead developer on the gtkmm and gnomemm C++ bindings for GTK+ and GNOME to get some information on the status of C++ development in GNOME." Read the interview at LinuxOrbit.