Eugenia Loli Archive

As laptops and mobility become more effective and prevalent, your job as a system administrator is to provide users with easy, secure access to their data. IMAP is one way to allow users to receive email wherever they go. Cyrus IMAP is a popular server, but installation and configuration is a bear. Fortunately, Francisco Reyes has the answer in this tutorial on installing and configuring Cyrus IMAP with Postfix.

VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.

Think installing Mac OS X and a suite of applications, documents, and settings on a single Mac takes all day? Imagine doing it on ten or a hundred or a thousand Macs! Fortunately, tools like Apple Software Restore and NetInstall have allowed administrators to do it a little bit faster, and now Apple has provided an even more amazing tool that gives administrators the ability to roll out hundreds of custom Mac OS X installs in a couple of hours!

For a conventional software tester, an Extreme Programming project may be an intimidating challenge. Testers often find that they're not welcome on XP projects, but Jonathan Kohl shares how skilled testing can overcome such difficulties. Jonathan discusses lessons he learned from working on two different XP project teams, only one of which initially welcomed his testing and feedback.

The recent release of Novell SUSE Linux 10.0 has elicited strikingly different reactions from a pair of reviewers -- Alan Canton, president of a software consulting company, who is experiencing SUSE for the first time; and eWEEK.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a seasoned SUSE user.

Solaris Express 10/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 23) was posted today, providing a variety of improvements. And for the first time, gdb and g77 are bundled with the operating system. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

The most popular PDA web browser, AvantGo, today announced the beta release of new RSS features in its mobile Internet service. The new features give users greater ease-of-use for viewing mobile RSS subscriptions online or offline, and expands the content available through AvantGo. If your phone or PDA doesn't have an AvantGo client port, you can always use the web-based version through any other browser. OSNews and GnomeFiles have both AvantGo support (after creating a channel for them on your personal my.avantgo.com page) and they render well on small screens automatically.

On October 6, Novell officially released SUSE Linux 10, the latest edition of its heavily armed desktop operating system. It offers a choice of great-looking desktop environments, a gigantic selection of desktop software and the much-acclaimed YaST setup and configuration program. Read the rest of the review here.

In its first update to a new community-based preview program, Microsoft is showing off a number of new features for Windows Vista, including efforts to improve the web browser and make the operating system more resilient.

Benoit Schillings, co-creator of the Be operating system (first engineer employee in 1992, creator of the BeOS app_server among other things) and former CTO of Openwave, has been appointed to the newly created position of chief technology officer (CTO) at Trolltech. In the meantime, Trolltech has also joined the new mobile OSDL initiative.

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial on how to connect your Mac to a GPRS service via Bluetooth and a Bluetooth-enabled phone. However, not everyone owns a Mac or a higher-end phone. And so here is a quick tutorial on how to connect your Linux laptop to a GPRS service using an infrared-enabled phone. For this article we used a Sony Ericsson K700i phone, a Sony Vaio N505VX laptop (which has an onboard IrDA) running the latest Arch Linux and Cingular's GPRS. In the following weeks I will also be publishing two more tutorials showing how to do the same thing under Linux but via Bluetooth and the USB port.

Max Brunning has posted a brief comparison of how these three Operating Systems approach a number of basic kernel tasks. He has a brief look at: Scheduling and Schedulers, Memory Management and Paging, and File Systems. Max is an Instructor who spends his time teaching Solaris internals, device drivers, and kernel crash dump analysis and debugging.

A Microsoft patch meant to fix critical security flaws in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is causing trouble for some users, the company said Friday.

The Open Source Development Labs, an industry consortium devoted to improving Linux, plans to launch an initiative Monday to bring the open-source operating system to mobile phones.