Thom Holwerda Archive

"KDevelop is the premier Free integrated development environment. The project is currently working towards KDevelop 3.4 with a bunch of new features and a major new version KDevelop 4. To find out what's coming up in one of KDE's most important projects KDE Dot News spoke to three of the authors about their current work and future plans."

Borland Software's Developer Tools Group is moving back to the company's roots and relaunching its Turbo brand of products - offering the tools both for beginners and nonprogrammers, as well as for professionals. Borland officials said the company is bringing back its Turbo brand of tools as a set of low-cost, language-specific rapid application development tools for students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals.

Although open-source software can be customized to meet a company's specific needs, its inherent complexity could dent the profitability of independent software vendors, says Microsoft. "One of the beauties of the open-source model is that you get a lot of flexibility and componentization. The big downside is complexity," Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's director of platform strategy, said.

Three weeks ahead of schedule, version 1.0 of Freespire, the no-cost community version of Linspire, is now available from the project's website. You can download a completely open source version, or a version that includes various proprietary codecs and drivers for an improved out-the-box experience. Screenshots.

VMware has announced a product designed to enable Mac OS X users to run multiple PC operating systems while Microsoft is putting a halt to a version of its Virtual PC software for Intel-based Macs.

The libferris virtual filesystem project now provides a yum repository for installation on Fedora Core 5 machines. With libferris you can mount PostgreSQL, XML, db4 files as a filesystem and also expose it to all applications using ferrisfuse. Extensive support for indexing and searching ferris filesystems is also available in the binary packages.

"In a fairly short time, Novell has transformed itself from a firm that had next to nothing to do with Linux into one of the Penguin's most visible and aggressive flag-bearers. For evidence of this metamorphosis, we need look no further than Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which breaks ground in the client operating system territory that Linux leader Red Hat has so far opted scarcely to tread. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or SLED, is the most polished Linux client operating system we've yet tested, and well-deserving of our Analyst's Choice designation."

At the 2006 WWDC in San Fransisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced several new products during his opening keynote speech. Read more for a chronological summary of the keynote-- including the much-debated preview of Mac OS 10.5, Leopard, which, according to Steve Jobs, will ship this spring. Update: Apparantly, a similar feature to Time Machine already exists in Linux. It is called 'Dervish'.

The Fedora Project announces the availability of Fedora Core 6 Test 2. One of noticeable features is the ability for Anaconda, the Fedora Core installer, to use other repositories, the support for MacIntel and for the first time, Firefox can now use Java through gcjplugweb. This distribution is aimed for testers due to bugs needed to be sorted. Download are available through torrent and mirror servers. Update by AS: Fixed typo. Update by ELQ: OSDir put up some shots of the FC6-test2.

In a surprising move, Andrew Morton, the Linux kernel co-maintainer, announced that he is moving to Google and that he will continue being a Linux maintainer. A detailed article can be found here: "It is beneficial to me (and to Linux) that I be in day-to-day contact with people who use Linux for real things. Hence Google is a good all-round fit."

"Welcome to GetWebKit, the home of the first and only WebKit based Windows web browser. Featuring the excellent rendering engine used in popular Macintosh web browsers Safari and Shiira, GetWebKit offers a free, powerful, and open-source internet experience." Seems like besides Opera, IE, and Gecko, there is now a 4th mature engine coming to the Windows platform.

Following its recent partnership with AMD to put the latter's chip in its server product line, Dell Computer confirmed this week that it will launch AMD-based laptops as early as October. The move could deal another blow to rival Intel. Dell will release mobile computers running AMD's Sempron and Turion 64x2 processors in early October, representatives from both AMD and Dell, told CNET Taiwan. Initial plans will target consumer models equipped with 15.4-inch displays.

"We all cheered when Apple began experimenting with community-driven, open source development for its flagship operating system. But if those experiments are now drawing to a close, should anyone really be surprised? In his columns earlier this year, InfoWorld's resident Mac aficionado Tom Yager noted how Apple seemed to be backpedaling away from open source. Seen through that lens, last week's news that the OpenDarwin Project would be closing its doors looks like just another sign of the times."

In a recent podcast Steve Gibson of grc.com has drawn attention to a detailed report by engineers at Symantec who demonstrate that Windows Vista contains a completely virgin network stack that has been programmed from the ground up. The Symantec software engineers have monitored the behaviour of the new stack through a series of beta releases and have documented that it contains most of the basic bugs and security holes that have long since been fixed in other stacks - even the Windows 95 stack. Since it has not had a chance to mature and develop in the wild, the likelihood that it contains new, uncharted holes and errors is very high. Some have already been found. Gibson stresses that the ramifications for the security of the new stack are disastrous.