Thom Holwerda Archive

More than a dozen technology companies, including IBM, Red Hat, and Novell are planning to support a new integrated server and desktop Linux standard unveiled at next week's Linux Desktop Summit by the Free Standards Group. The FSG is a nonprofit organization that has worked for years on a number of open standards including a server specification called the Linux Standard Base.

Apple Computer faced tough questioning Thursday in its bid to gain access to electronic records of Mac enthusiast sites that published leaked details of an unreleased product. Although a lower court ruled last year that Apple should be able to gain access to electronic records of the enthusiast sites, a three-judge appeals panel in the State of California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District, peppered Apple's lawyer with questions. The judges wanted to know whether the information at issue represented a genuine trade secret as well as whether journalists' right to protect their sources outweigh Apple's right to protect its trade secrets.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the beta release of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). With Ubuntu 6.06 Beta comes loads of bug fixes, a new look-and-feel, a new live-CD installer, GNOME 2.14.1, and much more." You can download it as both live-CD and install CD, and as always, available for x86, x86-64, and PowerPC.

LLVM 1.7 has been released. "This release contains a completely rewritten llvm-gcc (based on GCC 4.0.1), a brand new SPARC backend, supports GCC-style generic vectors, supports SSE and Altivec intrinsics, support for Objective C/C++, the X86 backend generates much better code and can produce Scalar SSE code, this release has initial DWARF debugging support, includes a new llvm-config utility, has initial support for GCC-style inline assembly, and includes many target-independent code generator and optimizer improvements."

"If your laptop computer is a complement to your desktop machine, you're probably well aware of the need to synchronize data between the two. When you're in the middle of a big project and know you're going to be spending the afternoon in a doctor's waiting room or on an airplane, it's nice to be able to quickly transfer your project files - and maybe your email and contacts - to the laptop, then vice-versa when you return to your desk. This article will show you two ways to accomplish this on GNU/Linux-based machines."

"Find out how to write extensions in code for other plug-ins while not creating a binary dependency on those other plug-ins with the Eclipse V3.2's dynamic-extensions API. Accomplish all of this and more with the Open Services Gateway Initiative services API and the dynamic APIs. This article shows an example of one plug-in taking in XML to register extensions for a defined extension point. We accomplish this complete decoupling of components by having the plug-ins Extension Registry aware and providing an OSGi service."