Thom Holwerda Archive

IBM Rolls Out Lotus Notes for Mac OS X

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-28 IBM 26 Comments

IBM's Lotus Software division is taking a bigger bite of Apple's Mac OS X. The company on Dec. 28 formally rolled out the latest version of its Lotus messaging software package, dubbed Notes 7.0.2, which will include e-mail, calendar management tools and instant messaging that is specifically designed for Mac OS X users.

Free Download of Yellow Dog Linux 5.0

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-28 Games 21 Comments

Those who intend to install a Linux distribution on a Sony PlayStation 3 will be pleased to learn that Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is now available for free download. Originally released on 27 November, Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is a Fedora-based distribution tailored to run on Sony PlayStation 3. It features a graphical installation program and includes the Linux kernel 2.6.16, X.Org 7.0 (3D acceleration not supported), Enlightenment 17 as the default desktop (KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.14 are also available), Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 and other popular open source software applications for desktops, servers, media playback and software development.

Submitted by frik85 2006-12-28 ReactOS 4 Comments

Apart from a new newsletter, ReactOS has also published its sixth interview with one of the developers. Art Yerkes, born in Philadelphia, PA, USA in 1974. He's been involved with ReactOS since 2002 and contributed primarily to the keyboard code in win32k and the network code. Lately much of the work has been networking related, as well as slowly giving birth to a PowerPC architecture port.

Shuttleworth: Plan, Execute, Deliver

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-28 Ubuntu 29 Comments

Mark Shuttleworth writes: "We are a somewhat chaotic crowd, the software libre army. Thousands of projects (hundreds of thousands, if you consider Sourceforge as a reference point). Hundreds of thousands of contributing developers from virtually every country and timezone. We are a very loosely coupled bunch. But sometimes I wish it were easier to keep track of changes and have a slightly clearer view of progress across that whole galaxy." Eugenia agrees.

Submitted by elsewhere 2006-12-28 Linux 76 Comments

"Proprietary kernel modules are flaky, out of date, and the bane of a Linux professional's existence - right? Maybe not. This three-part (part I | part II | part III) series makes a case for formalizing the uneasy truce between GPL-clean and 'tainted' modules."

Amsterdam, The Hague, Among Others, Say ‘Enough’ to Microsoft

Submitted by patrik uytterhoeven 2006-12-28 Open Source 31 Comments

"In February 2003, the program 'Open Source and Open Source Software for the Dutch government' started, funded by the Dutch government. One of the main tasks was to make the government independent from single software suppliers, among which are Microsoft and SAP. After three years, the effort starts bearing fruit. Ten big municipalities - together 2.7 million inhabitants and including Amsterdam and The Hague - signed a manifest. I'll try to explain what's in the manifest, what that might mean for the future, and for the monopoly of Microsoft in the Dutch government."

FreeBSD 6.2-RC2 Released

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-12-27 FreeBSD 30 Comments

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 6.2 has been released. "All problems we felt needed to be addressed before 6.2 could be released have been taken care of. Unless further testing turns up something new RC2, which is available now for dowloading, will be the last of the Release Candidates and 6.2-RELEASE should be ready in about 2 weeks."

AIX 5L LDAP User Management: Active Directory Client Support

Submitted by bluevoodoo 2006-12-27 Unix No Comments

Get an overview of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-related enhancements in the AIX 5L operating system V5.3 TL5 update. This lets clients configure and manage multiple systems with a single set of user identity configuration information, and it simplifies system administration.

Report: Apple Executives Faked Stock-Option Documents

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-27 Apple 32 Comments

Apple's stock took a hit Wednesday after a report that company executives had made up details on stock-option administration documents to guarantee profits for certain executives. The report said falsified documents were unearthed by Apple's internal probe into the matter. Earlier this year, Apple said it had identified concerns with two former executives as a result of its investigation into its accounting for stock options, and the report names former chief financial officer Fred Anderson and departed general counsel Nancy Heinen as the subject of the probe, although it's unclear whether they are the ones thought to have falsified the documents.

Working Example of an Interview (Qt4 MVC Framework) Model

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-26 Qt No Comments

This is a first of a series of articles which aim to provide a complete and working example of an Interview (Qt4 MVC framework) model. The model is to hold information about a 3D scene for use with OpenGL renderers like QGLWidget. The first thing to do when designing a model is to thing what is the purpose of making it. In this case, I want the model to store information about a 3D scene which can then be rendered using OpenGL (QGLWidget). The scene is to consist of some objects, which can be defined using various ways offered by the OpenGL specification. Part 2 and part 3 are also published.

Get the Most Out of Z Shell

Submitted by bluevoodoo 2006-12-26 General Development 7 Comments

Examine key parts of the Z shell (zsh) and how to use its features to ease your UNIX system administration tasks. Z shell is a popular alternative to the original Bourne and Korn shells. It provides an impressive range of additional functionality, including improvements for completing different commands, files, and paths automatically, and for binding keys to functions and operations.

2006: a Year of Surprise Linux Partnerships

Submitted by Jane Walker 2006-12-26 Linux 2 Comments

"It has come to be expected. Linux and open source news in 2006 was a potpourri of topics that included Windows-Linux interoperability, wild acquisitions and corporate spending sprees and stories of enterprise-level companies buying into open source and Linux en masse. Even better than that, many of yesterday's Linux and open source stories listed below still have the legs to become tomorrow's big news all over again."

Various Ways of Detecting Rootkits in GNU/Linux

Submitted by Ravi 2006-12-26 Privacy, Security 16 Comments

"A rootkit is a collection of tools a hacker installs on a victim computer after gaining initial access. It generally consists of network sniffers, log-cleaning scripts, and trojaned replacements of core system utilities such as ps, netstat, ifconfig, and killall. I know of two programs which aid in detecting whether a rootkit has been installed on your machine. They are Rootkit Hunter and Chkrootkit."

Submitted by falko 2006-12-26 Debian 8 Comments

"This guide is written during an install of a Supermicro machine with 2 dual-core opterons (64-bit), 2 identical disks (for RAID) and a load of memory. Why OpenVZ and not XEN or the recent KVM kernel module? Well, XEN is not very stable for 64-bit architectures (yet), and it comes with quite a bit of overhead (every VM runs its own kernel) due to its complexity. KVM is very simple but restricts you to run a kernel as one process, so the VM cannot benefit from multi core systems."

Tweaking KDE 3.5.5

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-25 KDE 71 Comments

For those of you who have not followed the comment thread on the 'On Favouritism, Apologies, and Black Helicopters' story: I there promised to write an article about all the customisations I do on KDE to make it look and (more importantly) behave in my own preferred way; as a sort of Christmas present, so to speak (it is not like it is a fast news day today). Read on!

Nouveau: First Look at Open-Source 3D NVIDIA Drivers

Submitted by Michael Larabel 2006-12-25 3D 65 Comments

"Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with Nvidia Corp and is an X.Org project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far."

Windows Vista ‘Capable’, ‘Premium’ System Requirements

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-25 Windows 30 Comments

Microsoft's Nick White blogs about the system requirements for Windows Vista. "We've officially released more detail on the system requirements for Windows Vista. These requirements outline what determines whether a PC is categorized as Windows Vista Capable or Windows Vista Premium Ready." Out of experience I can say these requirements are fairly realistic; the only thing I do not advise is the 512MB for Vista Capable; I'd suggest to up to 1GB no matter what.

LinuxBIOS: the Forgotten Hero

Submitted by Matt D. 2006-12-25 Linux 15 Comments

"Let's be honest here. When most of us think of open source and free software, we really aren't thinking of something flashed to a BIOS ROM chip. And yet when it comes to the Linux BIOS project - that's exactly what's happening here. The LinuxBIOS is a project designed to work out any perceived shortcomings from existing BIOS options distributed on today's motherboards. Started back in 1999, it has been in development steadily for quite some time now."

Submitted by AmigaRobbo 2006-12-24 Amiga & AROS 55 Comments

"Hyperion Entertainment is very pleased to announce the immediate availability (for registered AmigaOne customers) of Amiga OS 4.0, The Final Update. Originally released in May of 2004, Amiga OS 4.0 is the most stable, modern and feature-rich incarnation to date of the multi-media centric operating system launched by Commodore Business Machines (CBM) in 1985 with which it still retains a high degree of compatibility. Amiga OS 4.0, The Final Update is the culmination of 5 years of development and takes the form of a stand-alone ISO image which contains a full installation of all Amiga OS 4.0 components. A list of new features can be found here. Availability of PowerPC hardware suitable for operation with Amiga OS 4.0 will be announced by third parties early 2007." Together with Microsoft selling Linux and Apple switching to Intel, this is the definitive proof that hell is now officially frozen. I sure know I'm taking ice skates with me to the grave.

SUSE 10.2: Looking at KDE

Submitted by Bill Beebe 2006-12-24 SuSE, openSUSE 44 Comments

"This post comes at the convergence of a number of events. First, there was the story on OSNews titled 'Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?' That generated a number of responses, one of them from Aaron J. Seigo. With all the drama buzzing in the background, I went back to my Suse 10.2 installation and started to look at the KDE desktop."