Eugenia Loli Archive

PDA Which Runs Windows/Linux/UNIX OSes to be Unveiled at CeBIT

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-09 Wireless 10 Comments

According to Tiqit, although this feature was previously considered impossible to engineer, the eightythree is not a concept product. Instead, Tiqit says it has built -a mass produced- a fully functioning x86 handheld device out of cutting-edge but available parts, designed specifically for enterprise use and immediate production. In terms of components, eightythree's CPU is the National Semiconductor Geode, 266-300 MHz, RAM is 128 MB or 256 MB, and there is a 10 GB hard drive. The screen is a 4-in 640X480 TFT (18-bit color) with touchscreen and backlight. The external monitor displays up to 1280 x 1024 at 75 Hz, 1024 x 768 at 85 Hz. eightythree is powered by an internal lithium ion rechargeable battery. "This product will greatly accelerate adoption and use of handhelds in the enterprise," said Ian Blasch, CEO, Tiqit Computers. "It uses standard operating systems -- Windows XP, Linux or UNIX -- and is compatible with all associated applications, including legacy software. Almost anything you can do on a laptop or PC, you can do on eightythree -- only it is smaller and more mobile."

ROME 2.01 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-09 OS News 9 Comments

ROME is a lightweight, modular, multitasking, embedded operating system which has been developed and used for multiple research projects. ROME was designed to manage high speed data streams within a multimedia environment. The system is highly modular, with functionality split between multiple processes. To ensure a high throughput with minimal overhead ROME provides a zero copy architecture where pointer references to data are passed around instead of data being copied. The goal of this approach is to maximize the utilization of a given hardware configuration. ROME released version 2.01 yesterday.

Netscape Navigator Browser Snoops On Web Searches

Submitted by Chris Odum 2002-03-08 Mozilla, Gecko 23 Comments

"AOL Time Warner's Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique identification number." Read the report at NewsBytes. Our Take: Yet another reason to use the original Mozilla and not the Mozilla-Netscap(-ed) package by AOL.

Sun Files Suit Against Microsoft for Anti-Trust Violations

Submitted by Joseph R. Childrose 2002-03-08 Oracle and SUN 49 Comments

Sun Microsystems announced it has filed a private antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation. The suit, filed March 8, 2002 in the United States District Court in San Jose, CA., seeks remedies for the harm inflicted by Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior with respect to the Java platform and for damages resulting from Microsoft's illegal efforts to maintain and expand its monopoly power. In June 2001, the Federal Court of Appeals found Microsoft guilty of illegally abusing its monopoly power with respect to Sun and the Java platform. Sun's suit seeks to redress the competitive and economic harm caused by Microsoft's illegal acts. Read more on ZDNews.

Compiler Security Checks In Depth

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-08 General Development 2 Comments

"Software security is a major concern for the high-tech industry, and the most feared and misunderstood software vulnerability is the buffer overrun. Today, the mention of a buffer overrun is enough to make people stop and listen. All too often, the technical details get lost in the transcription, and the general public comes away with a rather alarming view of a rather fundamental problem. To address this problem, Visual (unmanaged) C++ .NET introduces security checks to assist developers in identifying buffer overruns." Read the rest of the article at MSDN.

Apple’s Dual Gigahertz System and the SPEC Benchmark

Submitted by Anonymous 2002-03-07 Benchmarks 44 Comments

"This January not only brought new Apple systems, but also a MAC OS X-adapted benchmark suite by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) entitled CPU2000. On the one hand, this suite allows comparisons to be made within a certain framework with the Intel competition and, on the other, it shows that Motorola and Apple were able to get more out of the new gigahertz processor than might have been expected by simply taking the pure clock frequency difference to the 866 MHz predecessor model into account." Apple G4 Dual 1 Ghz against a single PIII at 1 Ghz. Which is faster? Heise has the SPEC benchmark results. SPEC is known to be very precise when comparing the CPUs themselves without having major interference from the rest of the system or surrounded hardware. Our Take: AFAIK, the MacOSX license specifically states that no benchmarks results of any kind are allowed to be published. Coolio. UPDATE: Read more for some commentary on the results.

Alan Cox: What the Future Holds for Linux

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-07 Linux 5 Comments

In an interview with ZDNet U.K., the Linux 'kernel hacker' gives his views on the GPL, 64-bit computing and why grandmothers should want to use Linux. Alan Cox is generally referred to in the open-source developer community as a "kernel hacker"--someone whose programming responsibilities cover the Linux kernel, or core, itself. Thousands of developers all over the world, from hobbyists to IBM engineers, are constantly contributing to open source software, so Cox's role of organizing and applying improvements is vital.

Linux System Development on an Embedded Device

Submitted by Jeff 2002-03-07 Linux No Comments

Especially if you're just starting out in embedded development, the wealth of available bootloaders, scaled-down distributions, filesystems, and GUIs can seem overwhelming. But this wealth of options is actually a boon, allowing you to tailor your development or user environment exactly to your needs. This overview of embedded development on Linux on IBM's developerWorks will help you make sense of it all.

WAP Service Available on OSNews

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 Wireless 31 Comments

Along with our XML or PHP news feeds, OSNews is now offering WAP support for the readers that own a WAP-enabled mobile phone. Just point your WAP device on http://wap.osnews.com/ or on http://wap.osnews.com/index.wml and you should be able to access our 15 latest headlines. Please report any problems you may find on our comments section. Additionally, people with 4th generation mobile phones (mostly sold in Japan) capable of HTML should be able to render OSNews in full HTML, but in a more simple manner (no ads or nested tables). Just follow the same instructions as we have for the AvantGo, Lynx, Links and W3M browsers. Check the screenshot showing some WAP emulators and the three major text browsers rendering the alternative (and simpler) OSNews pages. UPDATE: I did some changes on the WAP source, please let us know if it now works ok with your devices. Thanks!

Linux Kit for Playstation 2 Pre-Orders Available

Submitted by Adam Bertsch 2002-03-06 Linux 10 Comments

The Linux (for Playstation 2) kit is now accepting pre-orders on playstation.com for North America. The kit will allow people to run a fully functional Linux environment on their Playstation 2 computer entertainment systems. If you are a developer, you can also install the SDL gaming libraries for the PS2 and port or write your own games for the popular gaming console.

Building a CD Bootable FreeBSD Firewall

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 FreeBSD 4 Comments

This document at BSDToday covers the basic steps in building a bootable CD containing a live FreeBSD filesystem with a couple of security features enabled and configured. With this CD, it is possible to transform a PC from a mediocre workstation into a VPN Gateway or firewall or both without touching the hard drive.

FOX Toolkit 1.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 Wayland 12 Comments

FOX is a C++ based Toolkit for developing GUIs easily and effectively. It offers a wide, and growing, collection of Controls, and provides state of the art facilities such as drag and drop, selection, as well as OpenGL widgets for 3D graphical manipulation. FOX also implements icons, images, and user-convenience features such as status line help, and tooltips. Tooltips may even be used for 3D objects. FOX stands for Free Objects for X. It was first developed under Linux, but it has now been ported to many flavors of UNIX, plus WindowsNT/2k/XP/9x/ME. After 4 years of development, Jeroen van der Zijp released FOX Toolkit 1.0 just a few days ago. FOX Toolkit is the third big cross-platform open source C++ toolkit, after wxWindows and Qt. In related news, Imperial Software Technology announced that it is now shipping X-Designer 7: Enterprise Edition, a major new version of its GUI builder for Motif, Windows and Java.

Cocoa Diversions at OReillyNet

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 macOS 2 Comments

"Mac OS X gave us a host of interface enhancements, for better or for worse. Some are seemingly frivolous, such as the whiz-bang animations that dominate Aqua, and others haven proven truly useful, such as the Finder’s column view. Personally, I dig it all." The article at O'ReillyNet discusses the main Aqua enhancements, animated window resizing and the drawers.

58-node Linux Cluster 1300 Benchmark Results on Red Hat

Submitted by Frank 2002-03-06 IBM 2 Comments

This paper presents the results of the test conducted on a 58-node Cluster 1300 system, simultaneously running eight instances of e-Business Trade 2 benchmark tests on Red Hat Linux. This solution mounted in only three racks supported 800,000 users, serving an unprecedented 12,547 requests/sec with an average response time of 0.27 sec/request.

Xft Hack Results to High Quality Antialias Rendering on XFree

Submitted by David Chester 2002-03-06 Wayland 23 Comments

David Chester has hacked through the Xft library and he achieved an incredibly good quality on antialias rendering under XFree86. With this "hack", at last, XFree can deliver similar aesthetic results with the MacOSX or Windows rendering engines. Check the two screenshots "before" and "after" at his page.

Lycoris Growing, Now Offering HP PCs PreLoaded With Desktop/LX

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 22 Comments

February was a month of rapid growth for Lycoris. Its flagship product, Desktop/LX, has been selling well and attracting worldwide partners. In addition to favorable reviews in the Linux world and surrounding tech community, Lycoris is responding to users' needs by providing Hewlett Packard PCs Pre-Loaded with Desktop/LX. OSNews will be featuring a Lycoris review in the near future.

QNX Previews New IDE for Embedded Development at ESC

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 QNX 18 Comments

Embedded developers who choose the QNX RTOS for its unmatched reliability will soon have another reason to use QNX technology: significantly faster development cycles. This is all thanks to the new QNX integrated development environment (IDE), to be showcased next week at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Francisco. Show attendees can have a sneak peek at this QNX offering in booth #818.

Sony-Ericsson Touts Symbian Smartphone

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-06 Wireless 4 Comments

"Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications today unveiled the P800, the company's first multimedia communicator sporting tri-band GSM/GPRS and integrated Bluetooth, a 208 x 320 pixel resolution color touch-screen, and a built-in digital camera. Running Symbian OS 7.0, the P800 is the most advanced GSM-based communicator in the world to date, and bears the potential to give Nokia's 7650 some serious competition - although the smartphones don't really compete in the same class." Read the rest of the report at InfoSync.

Using OpenSSH Security

Submitted by Jeff 2002-03-06 Privacy, Security 1 Comment

IBM developerWorks has come out with three articles on OpenSSH, a free version of the SSH protocol suite for network connectivity. The first discusses RSA/DSA authentication, the second introduces ssh-agent and keychain, while the last goes over Agent forwarding and keychain improvements. Its a great resource for someone who needs some encryption.

Steve Ballmer: Sanctions Would Destroy Windows

Submitted by Dennis Catt 2002-03-05 Legal 71 Comments

"Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the software giant would have to withdraw the Windows operating system from the market if a federal court approves sanctions being sought by nine states in its antitrust case, according to depositions released Monday." Read the rest of the report at News.com. Our Take: A non-development or withdraw of Windows and its support can hurt an immense number of companies, which can have a huge impact to the economy in many countries. I still can't get it. They are fighting Microsoft for the browser case, instead for its dirty business practices. It's comically tragic.