Thom Holwerda Archive

Abandoned Zone reviewed several lightweight Linux distributions, and concluded: "First of all it has to be clear that there's a difference between 'lightweight' and 'lightweight'. Especially Damn Small Linux is very lightweight, but also it's not really usable on 'more recent' systems. It think DSL is perfect for 486 or Pentium 1-based systems but nothing more. At the other side there are Zenwalk and Xubuntu which are pretty heavy lightweight distributions. I think the use of Xfce has something to do with that. All the others are floating between those two extremes."

"The new version of F-Script provides syntax for dynamically creating Cocoa classes. This is great for quickly experimenting, prototyping and using Cocoa interactively. You can type a class definition in the F-script console, hit return and immediately start playing with your new class. This article provides a quick introduction to this easy-to-use and powerful feature. You can experiment with it right now by downloading F-Script 2.0 alpha 3 ."

Many of us grew up with the idea of the component audio system. A receiver (or a separate preamplifier and amplifier), tuner (radio), record player, tape deck, and later on a CD player. If you were into more fancy stuff, you had a DAT or MiniDisc deck as well. While some of us cling on to this mindset like there's no tomorrow, the real world seems to favour a different method of consuming music. According to Erica Ogg (what's in a name), the component audio system is on its way out - thanks to the iPod and the commoditisation of music.

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

Coverity has published the 2008 edition of its Open Source Report. The report uses static code analysis on C, C++, and Java source code to determine the quality of the code. These reports are funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and supported by Stanford University, and are part of the US government's Open Source Hardening Project. The report is based on over two years' worth of data from Coverity Scan.

Slowly but surely, Haiku is moving towards their very first alpha release. It 'self-hosted' for the first time in February of this year, but it did require a few hacks to work properly. The need for hacks was removed April 1st (what's in a date) by Bruno G. Albuquerque. Recently, some more progress has been made.

The One Laptop Per Child project, including its leader Nicholas Negroponte, has weathered quite a few storms lately. There was a flood of criticism coming from the open source world when Negroponte stated that Windows might become the platform of choice, and when former employee and contributor Ivan Krstic stepped in the round, both the project as well as its leader had to face quite a few harsh words. All this hasn't slowed down the project at all, it seems, as Negroponte just unveiled the plans for version 2.0 of the OLPC. Instant update: There's a video of the unveiling too.

Vista has not exactly been a massive market success. Sales numbers might be satisfactory due to OEM agreements, but press and public reception have been terrible, and there are several recurring themes in the complaints from people. Microsoft took five of these recurring themes, and addressed them in a document called 'Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista'.

A week ago, the Fedora Project released Fedora 9 into the world. Fedora 9 comes with GNOME 2.22, KDE 4.0.3, Xfce 4.2.2, PackageKit, Firefox 3.0 beta 5, a 2.6.25-based Linux kernel, and much more. As always, the intertubes have been flooded with reviews, so we figured we would summarise a few of them.

Back in April 2008, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth pitched the idea of major open source projects synchronising their release cycles on a 6 month period. Projects like gcc, the Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, as well as the distributions, would work out an acceptable release schedule. It would allow for easier collaboration between the various projects, and hardware vendors would be better able to support Linux since all major distributions would ship with the same kernel version.

When Microsoft said it withdrew its offer to buy Yahoo earlier this month, many people figured the acquisition dance was far from over - that the withdrawal and the subsequent letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to his Yahoo counterpart were nothing more than a move in an ongoing strategic battle. It appears those people were right, as Microsoft just issued a statement regarding Yahoo.

It seems like we're really on the subject of filesystems and related technology the past few days. We had an interview with the man behind BeServed, an item on WinFS' current status, and now we - possibly - have news on ZFS coming to Linux. Possibly, because it's all speculation from here on out.

BeOS (and Haiku) has a very powerful filesystem, thanks mostly to its extensive use of attributes and live queries to search through these attributes. In order to access these powerful features over a network, you need a network file system that also supports attributes and queries - cue BeServed, Kevin Musick's network file system. A few weeks ago, the code to BeServed was donated to the Haiku project as open source under a MIT license, so HaikuNews and OSNews decided to interview Kevin Musick together. In addition, Haiku launched the Haiku Code Drive 2008.

Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child project have announced an agreement to work together on getting Windows XP available on the XO laptop, with trials starting in June 2008, and the RTM date set for August or September. Microsoft also demonstrated Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 running on the XO laptop - fully featured.