Thom Holwerda Archive

Virtualization in Linux: a Review of Four Software Choices

Submitted by Nemilar 2008-02-08 OS News 17 Comments

This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. This article compares four virtualization products available for Linux: the free, open source x86 emulator Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the commercial Parallels Workstation.

Submitted by tyrione 2008-02-07 Linux 122 Comments

Linus Torvalds, leader of the cult of Linux, took a swipe at Apple's OS X and Microsoft Vista in the same breath at a conference in Australia last week. Speaking at the linux.conf.au conference in Melbourne, Australia, a few weeks ago, Torvalds called Leopard 'utter crap' and bashed the proprietary OS makers for being greedy, according to Australian reporter Nick Miller in the The Age. "I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," Torvalds said. "(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." He also scoffed at his rivals' practice of revenue-through-renewal by launching upgrades that require new purchases. "An operating system should be completely invisible," Torvalds said. "To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment - to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

MacBook Air SSD: the Ars Review

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-07 Apple 10 Comments

After reviewing the HDD model, Ars now looks at the SSD variant of the MacBook Air. They conclude: "The USD 1300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn't cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that's certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times. Still, even if it's more usable, it's hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model."

Vista, Leopard, Linux To Compete in Hack Contest

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-07 Privacy, Security 17 Comments

Apple's OS X, Microsoft Windows, and Linux operating systems are to be pitted against each other in an ethical hacking contest in Vancouver next month. Run by the organizers of the CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference, the competition is a repeat of the 'PWN to Own' contest at CanSecWest in 2007, when security researchers competed to win a MacBook Pro and USD 10000.

Microsoft Upbeat About Windows on the OLPC’s XO

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-07 Windows 17 Comments

Microsoft is conducting field trials to ensure that a modified version of Windows XP SP2 will be able to run well on the One Laptop Per Child’s XO machine and that it will be able to support customers with a good experience on that hardware. "We are encouraged by what we have seen of Windows on the XO machine so far, and field trials started at the end of January involving about 200 XO machines running a customized version of Windows XP SP2 with a reduced footprint image," Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group, told eWEEK.

Apple’s Plans for Safari 3.1

Submitted by stan 2008-02-07 Apple 11 Comments

"The ability to download and immediately render non-standard web fonts is just one of several advancements Apple has planned for Safari 3.1, a small but significant update to its share-gaining web browser for both the Mac and Windows PCs. The release, which underwent private testing this week, will tie in a number of other enhancements, most of which have been under constant development as part of the company's WebKit open source application framework since last fall. They aim to provide Web developers a means of writing more dynamic and customizable web pages and iPhone apps, which will in turn provide surfers with a more feature-rich and enjoyable experience."

Microsoft Responds to ‘Save XP’ Petition

Submitted by DaMassive 2008-02-07 Windows 28 Comments

Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld's 'Save XP' petition web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is "listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us."

SCALE Interviews Members of the Haiku Project

Submitted by Ilan Rabinovitch 2008-02-07 Haiku 2 Comments

SCALE interviews Bruno G. Albuquerque (BGA) and Jorge Mare (Kokito) of the Haiku project. Haiku will be exhibiting and speaking at the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo. SCALE 6x will be held Feb 8 -10 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. The interview is a tad bit annoying to read due to the (lack of) formatting, but you'll get through it.

Submitted by ericvh 2008-02-07 IBM 6 Comments

"The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable 'of hosting the entire internet as an application'. This mega system relies on a re-tooled version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers so loved by the high performance computing crowd. IBM's researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails."

U2

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-07 Comics 1 Comment

Comic: "U2".

‘Elive Distro Illustrates Power, Beauty of Enlightenment’

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-05 Linux 32 Comments

"The Elive Linux distribution combines beauty with ease of use. Elive is based on Debian and uses Enlightenment as its windows manager, which gives the distribution a Mac OS X look and feel. Elive comes with dozens of easy-to-use desktop applications that just work. Elive started as a live CD, but now at version 1.0 it works well as a standard hard drive installation. The latest unstable ISO, 1.5, should be released shortly."

NEC Launches Vista Downgrade Product

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-05 Windows 27 Comments

The Japanese computer supplier NEC has officially launched a product to let network administrators downgrade machines running Windows Vista to XP. The OEM first made the product, NEC FlexLoad, available to customers on 25 January. However, the product was officially launched on Tuesday. Customers with a Vista licence can purchase the two-DVD pack for GBP 7, according to David Newbould, NEC UK's product marketing manager. The first DVD sets up a partition on the hard drive and installs core XP files and drivers, while the second DVD installs the remaining XP files in the partition, said Newbould. NEC recommends that customers burn a Vista recovery CD before installing the XP partition.

NVidia Purchases Gaming Physics Processor Maker PhysX

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-05 3D 3 Comments

Graphics card producer NVidia confirmed late yesterday it is purchasing Ageia Technologies, the first producer of so-called 'physics processors' for 3D gamers, for an undisclosed amount. Ageia Technologies is best known for its PhysX processor, which is supported by popular games such as Gears of War, the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series, and Unreal Tournament 3. Working under NVidia's wing will help the company properly implement PhysX into future product launches, which should result in a broader target market.

Ubuntu Makes it Easy for Parallel Virtualisation

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-05 Ubuntu 50 Comments

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it's making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels, formerly SWSoft, the company behind the open-source virtualization program OpenVZ, is best known for its Parallels virtualization software that works with Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation for Linux won't let you run Mac OS X, but it will enable you to run multiple versions of Windows or Linux with Ubuntu.

KDE 4.0.1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2008-02-05 KDE 17 Comments

KDE 4.0.1 has been released. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0.1. KDE 4.0.1 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and enhanced support for existing and new translations." Here's the changelog.

Microsoft Junks and Replaces Vista Kernel in SP1

Submitted by Dan Warne 2008-02-05 Windows 30 Comments

"One of the 'big' features discussed in early speculation of Windows Vista SP1 was the kernel upgrade, which was supposed to bring the operating system into line with the Longhorn kernel used in Windows Server 2008. And yet with Vista SP1 going RTM, there hasn't been so much as a peep from Microsoft about the mooted kernel update. Has it happened? Well the answer is yes it has, and presumably the main reason for Microsoft's silence on the subject is that as they're keen to promote the improvements and enhancements to Vista, rather than placing emphasis on a kernel upgrade, which some people might see as a risk of newly-introduced instability."

Submitted by andymc 2008-02-05 OS News 2 Comments

A preview of the 0.7 release of Visopsys is now available from the preview page. The page is light on details of the new technical features such as JPEG, 64-bit disk, UDF, and GPT support but provides screenshots and a breakdown of the updated look of Visopsys. As always you can try the OS from the 'live' CD image (and yes, after 10 years of development, there's still a basic version that fits on a floppy).

Submitted by Rahul 2008-02-05 Fedora Core 15 Comments

The Fedora Project has announced the alpha release of Fedora 9. Highlights of the Fedora 9 alpha release include partition resizing support for ext2, ext3, NTFS, and encrypted filesystems in the Anaconda installer, faster and more efficient yum dependency resolver, PackageKit, FreeIPA, GNOME 2.21 development release, KDE 4.0, Firefox 3 beta 2, 2.6.24 Linux kernel, and many others.

Submitted by irbis 2008-02-05 Linux 8 Comments

Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than 'a marketing thing', according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. "They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don't think they've - not that I've gone through any huge amount of law cases - but I don't think they've generally used patents as a weapon," Torvalds said. "But they're perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, 'Hey, isn't this convenient? We can use this as a PR force'."

Submitted by stippi 2008-02-04 Haiku 7 Comments

Well-known Haiku kernel hacker Ingo Weinhold has written an in-depth guide to using the Haiku kernel debugger. It describes the most important commands, introduces the recently added kernel tracing feature, and concludes with an example KDL session in which Ingo debugs an inter application deadlock. A recommended read, especially if you are a Haiku hacker or interested in becoming one.