Thom Holwerda Archive

"Microsoft's Monad provides a new command processor and a new way to create batch tasks. They leave the antiquated batch file in the dust. Monad offers you the full power of the .NET Framework to create your batch files. Its depth of functionality makes it part batch file and part application environment. Theoretically, you can create a full-blown application using just this scripting environment."

The developers behind Word 12 have added a blogging feature to Word 12. They have promised that the blogging feature wil output clean, unmangled HTML: "That's right. No more verbose Word HTML. The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog."

Linux may soon have a stronger open-source competitor on the desktop if FreeBSD's plans come to fruition. FreeBSD developer Scott Long told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the operating system, descended from the Unix derivative BSD, is "quickly approaching" feature parity with Linux. "Lots of work is going on to make FreeBSD more friendly on the desktop," Long said. "Within the year, we expect to have, or be near, parity with Linux."

LinuxForums reviews SUSE 10.1, and concludes: "Everything worked perfectly and the system seemed to be very stable. The boot splash, the login managers, the installer and the desktops were customized with a unified SUSE look and feel that made them beautiful and very professional. The YaST installer in particular impressed me a lot, and I was amazed to see how SUSE succeeded in making a great desktop operating system, both with Gnome and KDE, offering a lot of software, a lot of options, a lot of configuration tools without making it hard at all for the user. This release also comes with great new applications such as Xgl, Xen and AppArmor. Everywhere I looked, I saw really nice things, great ideas and a beautiful presentation."

"The Nautilus program in GNOME is not only the default file manager, it creates and manages the desktop. While it looks simple on the surface, there is a lot of hidden power under the shell. The latest version of Nautilus is 2.14.0, which is included in Fedora Core 5. That's the one I poked with a stick."

"You might not be familiar with messages, but they're extremely important, especially when you need to perform tasks outside of the range of tasks that Microsoft programmed into the .NET Framework. All communication in Windows relies on messages. This article reveals Windows messages to you, shows you how to capture messages that a .NET application doesn't normally capture, and demonstrates how to generate messages that .NET applications don't normally generate. In short, by the time you finish this article, you'll know about an entirely different world: the one that the .NET Framework hides from view."

For those who want an easy-to-configure and easy-to-install FreeBSD desktop system, Dru Lavigne demonstrates the features of PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. This first article is about PC-BSD. "If you haven't had a chance to try out PC-BSD, take some time to install and poke about this user-friendly operating system. If you're looking for a free and stable operating system for friends or family, burn them an ISO and have them give it a test drive."

Linux Format has an interview with Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, the director of Linux and OSS marketing at Novell. "It's been challenging for us to work with partners in a way that's rational, but we've decided that in the next generation of our enterprise products, GNOME will be the default desktop. But we will continue to ship and support KDE."

At its annual Press Day Wednesday, Google introduced three new services while attempting to kill the popular story in the media that it is involved in a fierce winner-take-all battle with Microsoft. Instead, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that there would never be a single victor. Schmidt said that having a single search engine would stagnate innovation. Competition, on the other hand, would support growth as well as advertising prices, and he added that there was room in the industry for more than one strategy.

Plans for an area of the internet dedicated to pornography were killed last night in a vote by overseeing organisation ICANN. In a split 9-5 board decision, the organisation acted ruthlessly, against its own previous position, in order to put an end to an increasingly difficult and controversial issue - the approval of a .xxx top-level domain.

"After lot of work and several delays, we proudly announce the availability of SUSE Linux 10.1. In tribute to 42 and as today is the fifth anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams, we dedicate this release to him. As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give special mention to Xgl for 3D acceleration on the desktop, NetworkManager for getting painless wifi access everywhere, the completely open source AppArmor 2.0, and the full integration of XEN 3 in YaST." You can get it from the download page. Update: Screenshots.

A feature called System Management Mode included in modern x86 cpus opens the way to the land of kernel space and the quest for ring zero. Federico Biancuzzi interviews French researcher Loïc Duflot to learn about the System Management Mode attack, how to mitigate it, what hardware is vulnerable, and why we should be concerned with recent X Server bugs.

Mad Penguin has published a short review of the Penguicon 4.0 convention and has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google. When asked what percentage of people at Google use Linux, he replied: "Probably way more than half. I don't know the exact ratios though. All the developers use it and most of the engineers and sysadmins."

Gstreamer developer Christian Schaller explains why he thinks Phonon (announced a few days ago by the KDE project) is a broken wheel. "I have held back blogging about Phonon for some time to avoid flamewars, but I don't want to have efforts like OSDL delayed due to setups like Phonon being promoted or thought of as a workable solution for the issues faced. Let me start of with a brief introduction to the area of multimedia frameworks."