Thom Holwerda Archive

"Due to the recent media hype surrounding the new MacBooks and the lack of actual experimentation, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Since I work in the IT department of a factory that uses all Dell computers, I was able to borrow a brand new Dell Latitude D620 for a few hours. Also readily available to me was an Oakton InfraPro infrared thermometer and my very own MacBook. There has been a significant negative response to the amount of heat emitted from the MacBooks. Since I own a MacBook, why not put it to the test!"

The Mono debate over on the GNOME desktop developer mailing list is heating up again. Philip Van Hoof makes a compelling argument about the need for GNOME decision makers to take into consideration future developers and the over-reliance of C and GObject in GNOME. At what point does a general-purpose, high level framework and runtime become a necessity for GNOME?

OpenOffice.org has been increasing in both popularity and visibility over the past several months. Version 2.0 has added a number of new features to bring it closer to feature parity with Microsoft Office, and it also offers full support for the Open Document format. However, a report just released by the French Ministry of Defense says that it still falls short of Microsoft's office suite in one important area: security.

"Microsoft and XenSource today announced they will cooperate on the development of technology to provide interoperability between Xen-enabled Linux and the new Microsoft Windows hypervisor technology-based Windows Server virtualization. With the resulting technology, the next version of Windows Server, code-named 'Longhorn', will provide customers with a flexible and powerful virtualization solution across their hardware infrastructure and operating system environments for cost-saving consolidation of Windows, Linux and Xen-enabled Linux distributions."

Sun has booted its Solaris operating system on a server with a prototype of its forthcoming Niagara II processor, one key milestone for the company's attempt to restore the relevance of its Sparc processor family. The first Niagara chip, formally called the UltraSparc T1, is used in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers that have come to market in recent months. Niagara II keeps its predecessor's relatively low 70-watt power consumption and extends its ambitious design elements, multiple processing cores and execution threads.

"Microsoft has just released the latest installment of the Windows Vista pre-RC1 builds, with Vista Build 5472.5 making its way to TAP and Tech Beta tester today, and for once, MSDN Subscribers too. Build 5472.5 is a standard FRE Staged build, only available in English at the moment, though Arabic, Japanese, and German builds may follow. At this point all the builds we are seeing seem to undergoing severe stages of heavy optimization: although faster code normally comes at the expense of larger files as a rule of thumb, this build of Windows Vista packs a punch performance-wise, but is only a 100 MB larger than its predecessor. "

"Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer. Tracker is also extremely fast and super efficient with your systems memory when compared with some other competing frameworks. It consists of a common object database that allows entities to have an almost infinte number of properties, metadata, a comprehensive database of keywords/tags and links to other entities. It has the ability to index, store, harvest metadata. retrieve and search all types of files and other first class objects."

"Hopefully you never had to restore your own system from a compromise and you will not have to do this in the future. Working on several projects to restore a compromised Linux system for various clients, I have developed a set of rules that others might find useful in similar situations. The type of hacks encountered can be very variate and you might see very different ones than the one I will present, or I have seen live, but even so, this rules might be used as a starting point to develop your own recovery plan."

"Artificial intelligence is 50 years old this summer, and while computers can beat the world's best chess players, we still can't get them to think like a 4-year-old. This week in Boston, some of the field's leading practitioners are gathering to examine this most ambitious of computer research fields, which at once has managed to exceed, and fall short of, our grandest expectations."

Since yesterday, .iso downloads for SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop/Server 10 have been available from Novell's download page. After seeking confirmation from Novell's Nat Friedman, we can confirm these are indeed the final releases. SLED 10 is available for x86 and x86-64, while SLES 10 can be obtained for x86, AMD64/EM64T, PPC, IBM Power, Itanium, and IBM's zSeries. According to Friedman, a "big marketing blitz" will happen today. OSNews reviewed the RC3 release of SLED 10 in two stages not too long ago.

Lots of news on Xen. Firstly, "This is a document about how to set up XEN and iSCSI on 3 Debian Stable machines so that you can have a virtual host that can be migrated live between 2 of the machines. The third machine will be the common disk for the virtual machine that is seen via the 2 machines running XEN." Secondly, "IBM and Novell are throwing their considerable weight behind Xen, but some experts are suggesting that these companies may be pushing this nascent technology too far too fast." Lastly, "You can now run OpenSolaris domains under Xen as dom0 with OpenSolaris domUs too."

Bink.nu has more information and screenshots on Windows Fundamentals. "Microsoft Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is a Windows-based operating system designed for enterprise customers with legacy PCs who are not in a position to purchase new hardware. WinFLP provides the same security and manageability as Microsoft Windows XP SP2 while providing a smooth migration path to the latest hardware and operating system."

"VMware has just released version 1.0 of its free VMware Server. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install the free VMware Server on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS."

"This article introduces you to GStreamer, a universal multimedia processing library that makes multimedia handling easy. GStreamer can answer many problems, such as 'I need to store all audio samples coming from various sources in a common format'. Because all formats are treated alike, you only need to write one tool. This saves time and makes the solution more robust and easier to maintain. Moreover, after you learn the GStreamer concepts, there's almost no limit to what you can apply it to."