Eugenia Loli Archive

"Windows XP helps itself to 20 per cent of your bandwidth, a useful tip at TweakXP reveals. But although this sounds like the sort of thing that could easily fuel paranoia (what's it doing with it?), it's more just a case of sloppy and wasteful configuration." Get the rest of the story at TheRegister.

"I predict that Linux will eventually be at the foundation of nearly every enterprise system and that the whole issue of which server operating system to choose will then disappear into ambient background noise. It's not often that I make predictions about predictions, but because the above prophecy is so bold, I'll make an exception: I predict that this will turn out to be one of the easiest predictions I've ever made." Nicholas Petreley predicts the future of Linux for ComputerWorld.

In last month's column, Dr. Edward G. Bradford, senior programmer at IBM, covered synchronization primitives and gave a reprise on pipes. This month he takes a first look at communication using sockets. Ed demonstrates some techniques for writing a sockets program and shows how his programming techniques perform in various operating system environments.

After a very short period of beta, Opera 6 for Windows is released. Read the press release or download the plain (3.2 MB) or the Java-enabled (10.7 MB) version. Opera 6 for Linux, Tech Preview 1, is also available.

If English is your native language and you are a technology or an OS savvy person, maybe you would like to join the OSNews Crew. OSNews needs people who enjoy writting feature articles, reviews and/or editorials and can deliver at least two or three of these articles each month (guidelines available). If you are up to the task, please let us know. If you are a developer (in this case, we couldn't care less about your native language, let C/C++ talk), who would like to write articles about algorithms, OS-related coding, OS techniques etc, we are also very interesting to host your article.

Daemonnews reports that "Looks like the OpenBSD project is a bit ahead of the scheduled Dec 1st release date for OpenBSD 3.0. This release is a 3 CD set, instead of the usual 2 CD set, but still comes in the 2CD size jewel case." In related BSD news, USB v2.0 support added to NetBSD-current. "The new ehci driver is still in development but is in a working state for some mass storage devices, such as CD-RW drives."

O'Reilly Network feature an interesting article regarding the QT 3.0 Toolkit, introducing C++ programmers to this elegant cross-platform OOP API. Also, the O'Reilly 'Programming with QT (2nd Edition)' book is slated to be released in the first quarter of 2002. Update: Another informative programming tutorial about asynchronous coding with QT, can be found at eZ.

LinuxPower features an interesting interview with Rodney Dawes. "At daytime Rodney is a faithful employee at Ximian working on making sure that the packages in Red Carpet are up to date. At night he is working hard to make his GNU/Elysium Linux distribution a reality."

MC emailed us about his own, new, operating system for x86 processors called... BugOS. Latest version is less than one month old, and the OS even has a TCP/IP stack, IDE driver, 64-bit FAT filesystem, a micro-kernel and more. The OS can be booted from a partition, from within DOS, CD-ROM or from two floppies.

Lineo, current holder of the CP/M and DR-DOS intellectual property, decided to open source the two operating systems. CP/M is a legendary operating system of the '70s and '80s, while DR-DOS is a clone of MS-DOS, used by Novell and Caldera at the end of the '80s and in the beginning of the '90s. Get more information at the full story at NewsForge. Update: DR-DOS' source code is only available for a fee.

Galeon 1.0, the browser that utilizes the Mozilla engine but in a lightweight fashion, was released recently and the LinuxLaboratory feature a quick review of the application. In related news, Opera Software announced the Opera 6 TechPreview version for Linux.

The Unununium-based distribution FRuSTRaTiON, version 0.3, has just been released. Features improved console support, new keyboard code with unicode support, ext2 file system support; and it can now run applications. Unununium is a Single-Addressing-Space environement entirely developed in 386+ assembly with an emphasis on speed. The system is entirely dynamic: Any component of the system may be reloaded at any time; there is not even a static nano-kernel. Channeled IRQ, dynamic linker, memory allocation, 3d engine and communication channels are only a few of the elements present in the system. Multiple virtual consoles support, fixing the thread engine and starting the development of a GUI are their current development priorities.

"GNOME is not an independent software project; it is a part of the GNU system. This means GNOME does not exist just for its own success. It has a purpose: to provide the GNU system with a desktop. So while we should try to make GNOME successful (all else being equal), that's not the highest goal of the work on GNOME. If, on the other hand, GNOME and the rest of the GNU system are widely used, but mainly in combination with proprietary software, they will have succeeded only part-way, and a big task will remain ahead of us." Read the rest of the answers, and also have a read to the issue that was raised a month ago between RMS and some of the GNOME members.

"It's been a tough year for Linux companies. Those that didn't go bust announced large layoffs as investors realized that businesses built around a free operating system weren't poised for aggressive growth. The Linux Hatchery at this month's Comdex convention was home to just two companies, down from about 150 last year." Read the rest of the story at NewsAlert.