Thom Holwerda Archive

Red Hat will announce its latest quarterly earnings today, and if the outlook of its partners provides any clue the report should be good for shareholders – as well as in future quarters. Especially interesting in a Wall Street analyst's recent report is a finding that 45% of Red Hat’s partners are seeing customers migrating from Windows to Red Hat. That trend could be a tremendous growth indicator for the Hatters since Microsoft dominates world markets and much of Red Hat's growth in the past has come at the expense of Unix or other Linux providers.

In the SCO case a new order severely limits SCO's claims. finding that 186 out of 294 items in SCO's final disclosures are not up to the standard ordered by the court. IBM disputed 198 items for not being specific enough and the court granted the motion on 186 of the items limiting the case to 107 items.

Attendees of the recent New England Oracle Applications User Group conference got a refresher course on some of the key tools that Oracle developers use to customize E-Business Suite applications. Sridhar Bogelli, the leader of the session and founder and chief executive officer of Apps Associates, an application development consultancy, told attendees that properly using the tools provided by Oracle and third-party vendors can help developers and their companies avoid embarrassing, production-related problems.

"I would like to introduce a new addition to the WebKit open source tools - a JavaScript debugger. Drosera, named after the largest genera of bug eating plants, lets you attach and debug JavaScript for any WebKit application - not just Safari. One of the unique things about Drosera, like the Web Inspector, is that over 90% of it is written in HTML and JavaScript. This is a true testament of what you can do with web technologies today and the rapid development that WebKit allows."

Yesterday, Magnussoft, via the ZETA-OS site, announced the launch of the new Beta Test program. A difference in this beta test program is that the testers will not only work with the OS itself but also with beta applications, drivers and even kernel modules (when you apply you can choose if you want to test only one of those or all of them). What's also nice about this is that everyone can apply, without the need for prior experience in beta testing.

Could many smaller Linux distributions be in violation of the GPL? That's what Warren Woodford, the man behind the popular MEPIS distribution thinks. As detailed in Bruce Byfield's excellent NewsForge story, "A GPL requirement could have a chilling effect on derivative distro", Woodford recently ran afoul of the GNU GPL (General Public License) requirement that downstream distributors of GPL code are obligated to provide source code to users in an easily accessible format.

Sun Microsystems plans to deliver support for the Xen virtualization technology in Solaris 10 by the middle of 2007. Sun is preparing to release to OpenSolaris sometime in July a snapshot of code that will run on top of Xen and which provides Dom0 (Domain zero) support using Solaris Dom0, which supports 32-bit and 64-bit Linux and Solaris DomU's, said Tim Marsland, Sun's CTO of operating platforms, at a media briefing on virtualization at Sun's San Francisco offices June 27.

A new version of Plan 9 has been released. "Major changes were made to /sys/src/fs, removing some dead code. Some major bugs were fixed. New features were added and the memory limit was increased." More information can be found in the mailing list message. For those that don't know: "Plan 9 was born in the same lab where Unix began. Underneath, though, lies a new kind of system, organized around communication and naming rather than files and processes. In Plan 9, distributed computing is a central premise, not an evolutionary add-on."

"A Linux Terminal Server offers any business an elegant and cost-effective way to integrate the power of open source. In this article, I review some basics of network topology and offer suggestions about how to install a prototype server. I top it off with some tips for business-specific installations and configuration."

"Western Digital has settled a class action lawsuit concerning the deceptive labeling of their hard drives. The problem occured when consumers bought hard drives with a stated capacity. As an example, let’s say you purchased a Western Digital 250 gigabyte hard drive. After you install the drive into your computer, you will notice that the drive size has become 231 gigabytes. The reason for this is that Western Digital, along with most hard drive manufacturers, calculates the storage capacity of their hard drives using the decimal system. This in contrast to virtually all operating systems that calculates the capacity of the hard drives with the binary system. As hard drives become larger, this discrepancy grows larger."

"It's been known that the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) phones home for quite some time now. For most of us, we've come to live with Microsoft's decision to relegate the software to only contacting the company's servers once every few weeks . Of course, the software is only in beta right now, so what might happen once it goes into production? Will it phone home even less? Ed Bott has an idea. Bott has reason to believe that Microsoft might have a special treat in store for those that do not want any part of the WGA. Citing Dave Farber as his source, Bott thinks that the WGA could become mandatory for Windows users. Those that don't want to install the software must suffer the consequences - install it in 30 days or Windows will stop working, period."

"The impending release of Windows Vista with its fancy Aero Glass special effects, along with the hasty addition of the similar XGL and Compiz technologies to the latest SUSE Linux release makes me think that programmers have a warped idea of what desktop computing is about. For some reason, many GNU/Linux users are concerned about competing feature-for-feature with Vista, while Apple and Microsoft struggle to add more graphical extras to their already graphics-intensive desktop OSes. It's gotten so that you need a serious 3D video card (with proprietary drivers) and a fairly fast computer just to keep up with desktop environments. Whatever happened to being productive and having fun?"

A preview edition of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, the desktop Novell's been working on for the last two years, is now available for download. Reviews are also available, as well as a demo. Get it from Novell's download page.

Apple Computer on Tuesday released Mac OS X 10.4.7, a maintenance and security update to its Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system. The update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for applications and technologies.