Eugenia Loli Archive

Review: Debian 3.1

As the first Debian release to use the new installer, version 3.1, a.k.a. Sarge, goes a long way to detonating the myth that Debian is hard to install. Moreover, because it includes -- for the most part -- up-to-the-moment software while conforming to strict free software guidelines and offering better than average security, 3.1 is easily the most accessible version of Debian ever released.

Does ‘community’ still exist in open source?

"The nature of the open source community is changing. I'm not exactly sure what "open source community" means anymore. When I first got involved with open source in 1998/99, the community was distinct: It was Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Robin Miller, and others like them. Developers. Gear heads. Hackers. Today, it's unclear whether that community still exists in any separate, discernible form." Read more here.

KDE 3.5-beta Observations

A few screenshots of an early build of the upcoming KDE 3.5 release. Among notable features, Konqueror gets Adblock, and KDE gets some usability features that were introduced in GNOME 2.10. This will be the final release of KDE in the 3 series.

Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders

User-interface experts at one of the world's top design houses say Mac OS X Tiger is the beginning of the end for the Macintosh Finder -- the era of organizing files in nested folders is over. Experts at Silicon Valley's frog design say new features like the systemwide Spotlight search are far more useful for locating information than the hierarchy of files and folders that underpins most computing interfaces, whether on Macs or Windows-based PCs.

Windows Command Line to be overhauled

The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. This confirmation comes from Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia in an interview published today by Microsoft. 'Monad' Scripting Shell Unlikely to Debut in Longhorn says Mary Jo Foley though: Microsoft is planning to make its alternative to Unix and Linux command-line scripting available as part of Exchange 12, due next year.

GNOME versus CDE performance on SunRay

"We received reports that GNOME was orders of magnitude slower than CDE on Sun Rays. To verify and measure this, I designed and ran some performance tests in order to compare the time and bandwidth usage of GNOME (JDS) with that of CDE on Sun Rays. The tests measure the time it takes to display data using various desktop applications: Browser, StarOffice and Terminal." Read more here.

NetBSD pkgsrc frozen for new stable branch

The NetBSD Packages Team has frozen the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q2. The freeze period began on June 6th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks at the most. During this time, the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. See Alistair G. Crooks's message to the tech-pkg mailing list for details.

Microsoft’s road map for Longhorn tools

Microsoft later this year will look to populate the market for Windows Longhorn applications with development tools and the company's own server applications, including long-awaited updates to the Visual Studio programming tool and SQL Server. Also, although Microsoft is still working on the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn and due to ship in 2007, the company already has a team working on Longhorn Release 2 and is looking at the potential feature set for Blackcomb, the version that follows Longhorn.