Eugenia Loli Archive

"The recent emphasis of the Linux community has been on desktop distros that make it easy to install and configure the system without venturing beyond the GUI. Despite the success of these beginner-friendly systems, a significant segment of the Linux population prefers a simpler approach. These back-to-basics users want clarity, stability, and speed, and they do not care about the proliferation of redundant tools and glossy configuration helpers that populate the GUI-based systems. In the past, no-frills Linux users gravitated to systems such as Slackware, Gentoo, or Debian, but another back-to-basics distro is gaining favor among the Linux faithful: Arch Linux."

Chris Muench is a mobile and embedded MVP. Here he shows how to write a managed Direct3D application for Windows Mobile devices.

The inaugural release of Mandriva One, a new live CD that aims to simplify the installation of the Mandriva Linux operating system to a hard disk directly from the live CD, has been released: "An operating system is generally available as a live CD or a set of installation CDs, but not both on the same disc. Mandriva One differs in offering an all-in-one CD based on Mandriva Linux 2006."

Learn Objective-C with Xcode in the new free PDF book from Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin. Jump into Cocoa Development with some ready made classes and example code for XCode 2.0 and above. The book starts from scratch with basic programming knowlegde and ends up in the depth of Objective-C and Cocoa.

"I've been working for the past 15 months on repairing my rusty math skills, ever since I read a biography of Johnny von Neumann. I've read a huge stack of math books, and I have an even bigger stack of unread math books. And it's starting to come together. Let me tell you about it," writes programmer Steve Yegge.

The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) is a new Eclipse project devoted to providing an open source framework supporting the creation of communications-based applications on the Eclipse platform. This article gives gives you a quick glimpse into ECF and an example that demonstrated one of the many capabilities the framework provides, and its future direction.

This article presents results of an investigation of the usage of .NET on five versions of Windows. The operating system files for the first version of Windows tested, XP Pro with Service Pack 2 applied, did not use .NET at all. This is understandable because XP was released before .NET was first released. The next version of Windows was the PDC 2003 build of Longhorn. This has a similar number of unmanaged executable files as XPSP2 but it also had thirty five .NET assemblies. Amongst these assemblies were two services.

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.14, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform Free desktop environment. Foresight Linux 0.9.4 was first to incorporate GNOME 2.14 on their distribution, VMWare and Qemu images are already available in addition to their normal distribution.

Ever get tired of reading your news about BSD? Try BSDTalk then. So far they got about 20/10 minute podcasts regarding BSD related news and info.

Sometimes an app isn't there for your architecture. This happens now and then for AMD64. It can be handy to chroot into x86 and symlink to the x86 app afterwards. Also, despite Ubuntu's stability, catastrophic failures do happen, and when they do it is important to have a backup so that your data can be recovered. This HowTo goes over creating an image of your installation so that you can restore your system if needed with all the programs and updates already installed. Elsewhere, Kubuntu Flight 5 was released.

Team System posted a tutorial on how to install and configure Subversion under Windows, while this article describes how to create both the repository and your projects while running on Windows or Linux.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA4 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA4. A couple of significant changes were made to 6.1-BETA4. First is a large set of fixes to the VFS layer and various filesystems that should significantly help performance under heavy load and also fix problems with forcefully unmounting these filesystems. The second large change is that sysinstall will now install both the GENERIC and SMP kernels and automatically select the appropriate one based on whether it detects one CPU in the system or multiple CPUs.

"The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest programs. Fedora Core 5 (FC5) is slated for release next week." Read more of the preview here. Elsewhere, Christopher Blizzard of Red Hat blogs about modifying Fedora to fit into the OLPC project needs and the optimization work being done on Fedora as a result of it using Red Hat open sourced tools like Dogtail.

"Within the past two years, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have all released freely available versions of their flagship database servers, a move that would have been unheard of just a few years ago. While their respective representatives would argue the move was made in order to better accommodate the needs of all users, it's fairly clear that continued pressure from open source alternatives such as MySQL and PostgreSQL have caused these database juggernauts to rethink their strategies within this increasingly competitive market."