Thom Holwerda Archive

Red Hat is going through a growth spurt as companies become more comfortable with its software as an alternative to Windows and profits fuel the expansion, executives with the developer of open source software said Tuesday. Profitability expanded even as Red Hat grew to more than 1200 employees.

"Here are my few suggestions to make better desktop (making it simple but powerful). Most of them are for GNOME and related applications but for other desktop environments and applications could be also useful. This suggestions are not of type make it faster (what is also important) but of type make it more useful. Some of them are my own thoughts but some suggestions are inspired by existing programs. And even some are not real suggestions." Note that English isn't his native tongue.

"Theo de Raadt is the project leader for OpenBSD, a Unix-like operating system. We spoke with Theo about the upcoming release of OpenBSD, 3.9, the financial state of the project, and about companies that profit from free software without contributing back."

Microsoft has delayed until early 2007 an update for Microsoft Virtual Server, a technology that lets a computer run multiple incarnations of Windows simultaneously. The SP1 update to Virtual Server 2005 R2 will include support for two chip features, Intel's Virtualization and AMD's Virtualization, that ease the task. Previously it had been scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter, but a Microsoft representative confirmed the slip on Tuesday.

Over the last two weeks, Debian developer Martin Michlmayr compiled the whole Debian archive on a quad-core MIPS machine donated by Broadcom using GCC 4.1. The aim was to find problems in GCC 4.1 itself and bugs in free software projects exhibited by GCC's increased standards conformance (in particular regarding C++ code). Read more for the details.

Google is contemplating a move to join the Eclipse Foundation in some capacity. Greg Stein, an engineering manager in the open-source group at Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, told eWEEK that Google has considered joining Eclipse and has talked with Eclipse's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, about the possibility.

The DesktopBSD team has released their most important release to date-- DesktopBSD 1.0 is now available via .torrent or as a 'normal' download. The release includes KDE 3.5.1, FreeBSD 5.5-PRERELEASE, a user-friendlier package manager, and many more smaller improvements, which are detailed in the changelog and the release notes.

BusinessWeek is reporting that Microsoft's next release of Internet Explorer, version 7, will not be integrated into Windows. Breaking nearly ten years of tradition, Internet Explorer was always very tightly integrated into Windows, allowing users to do such things as launch a website directly from any Windows Explorer window, or save a live web page as the desktop wallpaper.

"As we all know, the operating system is an essential part of any computer system, but what most of us don't understand are the intricacies of how OS environments operate. This article discusses the ways of extending the operating system by various ways including, but not limited to, recompiling the kernel and managing libraries. Extensibility is the need of time. It gives the user more 'power' over the machine, since every user can have his 'personalized' copy of the OS. This approach of extending the operating system at user level is more advantageous than other methods."

OpenBSD 3.9 will include a new sensor framework to allow system administrators to monitor the environmental conditions of servers running OpenBSD. OpenBSD 3.9, which is scheduled for release on 1 May, includes support for the sensors and the sensor management tools used on a number of architectures, Theo de Raadt, the founder and lead developer of OpenBSD, told ZDNet UK earlier this week.

"For desktop users, monitoring resource usage is an important task. By doing this, we can locate system bottlenecks, plan what to do to optimize our system, identify memory leaks, and so on. The problem is which software one should use and how to use it according to our needs. Among many monitoring tools that are available, most people use 'top'. Top provides almost everything we need to monitor our system's resource usage within a single shot. In this article, all the information is based on procps 3.2.5 running on top of Linux kernel 2.6.x."

"Core Data is a powerful data-management framework introduced with Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. When you take advantage of Core Data, it slashes the amount of custom code you need to write in order to manage application data. Opening, saving and undo management can all be handled by Core Data, freeing you to concentrate on creating unique features for your application. This article is meant to address a somewhat different aspect of the power of this technology: the rapid development capability that is enabled by Core Data, Xcode and Interface Builder."

Yes, it has been 10 years since Palm Computing launched its first product, the Pilot 1000. The handheld pioneer has had a checkered decade of bad management decisions, botched acquisitions and increasing competition from phone companies. However, Palm said a new relationship with Microsoft, a focus on smart phones and a future of software partnerships have put the company back on track.

While the X86 world hops from one to two processing cores, startup Azul Systems plans to integrate 48 cores on its second-generation Vega chip, expected next year. The first-generation Vega processor it designed has 24 cores but the firm expects to double that level of integration in systems generally available next year with the Vega 2, built on TSMC's 90nm process and squeezing in 812 million transistors. The progress means that Azul's Compute Appliances will offer up to 768-way symmetric multiprocessing.