Thom Holwerda Archive

Desktop sales played a big role in Hewlett-Packard's recent news-making profit gains. In the future, Linux will figure prominently in HP desktops, says Christine Martino, vice president of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization. She's not predicting an overthrow of Windows desktops anytime soon, though.

Millions of music fans will be given free music downloads or money to compensate for flawed anti-piracy software on CDs from label Sony BMG. The final approval to the settlement for lawsuits against the music giant was granted by a US judge on Monday. Sony BMG was accused of using copy protection program on CDs that left computers vulnerable to hackers. The episode caused much embarrassment for the world's second largest music label.

It's the hour of reckoning for Windows Vista. After five years of course changes, false starts and a host of beta and CTP builds, Microsoft is set to deliver a broad-scale build of Vista to two million testers. Microsoft is likely to drop the build - known by multiple names, including the consumer Vista CTP and Vista Beta 2 - as early as the week of May 22 at the WinHEC in Seattle, according to company watchers. And on a related note, if you want the fancy Vista look on your XP machine, check out this transformation pack.

eWeek takes a look at Sony's Vaio SZ160, and concludes: "Sony's Vaio SZ160 is the type of laptop that executives ask for - and with good reason. With a 13.3-inch widescreen format and an Intel Core Duo dual-core processor, this 3.8-pound laptop offers business users exactly what they're looking for. It has great features, including a Web cam and an integrated microphone for videoconferencing, and the Vaio SZ160's bright screen is one of the best eWeek Labs has seen among the current crop of systems."

"A new distribution partner for the alternative operating system ZETA OS has been announced. The worldwide distribution rights for the ambitious Operating system have been granted to Magnussoft Germany. This also means that the continuation and future of operating system ZETA, despite the problems of yellowTAB GmbH, has now been secured. A first production run to satisfy the increasing demand for version 1.2 has already been initiated. The first copies from this run should arrive at existing dealers within a couple of days."

Mad Penguin has published a review of SUSE 10.1, including info on multimedia, XGL/Compiz, and a flash movie of the installation. They conclude: "The desktop itself is one to be reckoned with. I was able to be instantly productive with this release of SUSE. I didn't need to “fiddle” with anything outside of getting multimedia support back in place, but that's another argument for another day isn't it? The bottom line is that I was able to install the OS and apps, sit down, and go right to work."

"The Security Team has been concerned for some time by anecdotal reports concerning the number of FreeBSD systems which are not being promptly updated or are running FreeBSD releases which have passed their End of Life dates and are no longer supported. In order to better understand which FreeBSD versions are in use, how people are (or aren't) keeping them updated, and why it seems so many systems are not being updated, I have put together a short survey of 12 questions. The information gathered will inform the work done by the Security Team, as well as my own personal work on FreeBSD this summer."

"If you are developing EFI applications or drivers for Intel-based Macintosh systems, it is likely that you will prefer to develop on Mac OS X rather than on Windows, Linux, or any other system. The rest of this document will help you jumpstart EFI development on Mac OS X. In fact, you can use either the PowerPC or x86 version of Mac OS X for hosting an EFI build environment."

Did Apple make a mistake by switching to Intel? We may never know, but Apple had more options than has been previously reported, The Register can exclusively reveal. A chip start-up that created a high performance, low power processor compatible with existing Mac software had been working closely with the computer company for many months. "PA Semi was counting on that deal," said one source. "They had lots of guys walking around in a daze when Apple went to Intel. They had no idea that would actually happen." Ars's Hannibal, criticaster of Apple's reasoning to switch to Intel, also expressed his thoughts on this issue.

"The developer of the ArcEm port to Amiga OS 4 has sent in a video of RISC OS 3 running on his 800MHz Amiga computer. He described the RISC OS 3 desktop as slightly sluggish, although games fare much better in the Archimedes emulator. The video shows Chris briefly using the desktop, fiddling with the Filer and Task Manager, before loading up the familiar Lander demo - including the inevitable crash landing that shortly follows."

"Shipping with Windows Vista will be the latest version of Internet Information Services (IIS), which includes a broad collection of features and capabilities that have been anxiously awaited by both developers and IT Pros. Scott Guthrie and Bill Staples describe and demo new features in IIS 7.0."

The Syllable team has released Syllable 0.6.1. New in this release: initial ACPI support and better PCI resource management, new application events API, lots of driver updates and additions, new versions of Syllable's browser and mail client, ports of CUPS and Samba3, and support for the REBOL language.

FreeBSD now both boots and survives a complete 'make buildworld' on the Sun Niagara UltraSPARC T1 CPU. "I'm proud to announce that FreeBSD on the T1 is now stable enough that it can 'make buildworld' natively. The source is currently available in perforce under the view //depot/projects/kmacy_sun4v/... I probably won't roll it back into CVS until the logical domaining support is done. I'm looking forward to receiving input from individuals who plan to deploy it to find out what workloads to target in performance tuning."

"In the hubbub over the ODF and competing 'what you see is what you get' word processors, a long-standing alternative model of word processing systems has been mostly overlooked. The author of LyX, Matthias Ettrich, calls this approach 'what you see is what you mean'. However, it's a philosophy that you will find in many 'native' free software text-processing systems everywhere, from online 'content management systems' to book publishing. You write what you mean, then you use some type of formatter to create presentation layouts. LyX, with its integrated graphical environment, may be the friendliest place to learn it."