Thom Holwerda Archive

The KDE team has announced the release of KDE 3.5.2, a maintenance release of the 3.5 series which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. For more details, check the changelog. Binary packages for some distributions are available, and the sources are too, obviously.

"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."

This project combines Ubuntu and MythTV into a lightweight, undemanding HTPC computer. "The plans were, roughly, to install a hard drive, move to a more powerful Linux distribution, and add PVR capabilites to the system. Because the computer was already situated in my living room, making it into a personal video recorder was an obvious choice, though doing this on a Mini-ITX Linux system would surely take a bit of finesse."

"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."

Virtual Appliances, a maker of nano-sized virtual machines for VMWare, announced their first release last week, an NFS/SMB to web server appliance for VMWare. Their base model is a 15MB download. The appliance is based on Gentoo Linux and is free to use.

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.

"On this day ten years ago, the first prototype StrongARM processor card was powered up by Acorn engineers. The experimental kit managed to run at a cool 228MHz, running software nearly six times faster than the 40MHz ARM710 processors used in RiscPCs at the time. The card, which drew one watt of power, would later go on sale in September 1996."

IsComputerOn (back from some downtime) has previewed the latest ZETA 1.2, still in beta testing, soon to be available to the general public. "Well, this is not the final 1.2 version, but so far my experience with this beta (and the previous ones) has been very pleasant. Stability issues have been (mostly) solved, speed has increased and the overall look has improved as well (the new buttons, tabs, the default decor has been improved too), making this a good experience throughout the beta testing." Many screenshots included, boys and girls. Expect a review of a 1.2 beta on OSNews too, soon.

"Ever tried this query in Google: "Linux-like environment for Windows" with inverted commas? If you have, it gives exactly 13700 results. Now try the same other way around. Google "Windows environment for Linux" but don't use the quotes from previous query. It yields approximately 1150 results. This clearly shows that there are numerous applications that simulate a Linux environment on Windows and vice versa. But are all these applications really required?"

"In what must have seemed to many as a bold move, Sun Microsystems last week announced that it would released the source code for its UltraSparc T1 processor under the GPL, supported by a new organization that it calls OpenSPARC.net. But to those that have been around for a while, the announcement had an eerily familiar sound to it, and that sound was the echo of an organization called SPARC International. Formed 18 years ago to license the SPARC chip design to multiple vendors to ensure second sourcing for the hardware vendors that Sun hoped would adopt it, SPARC International seemed to be every bit as revolutionary for its time as Sun's new initiative does today. SPARC International's site, looking very retro and neglected, can still be seen - at least for now."

Todd Blanchard has released version 1.7 of ObjectiveCLIPS. "ObjectiveCLIPS allows the creation of intelligent Cocoa applications with persistent object models and complex business rules. Out of the box, Apple gives you the ability to write Cocoa applications with dumb passive data models using CoreData. However, there is no convenient way to express complex constraints and dependent values without writing custom business objects. Even if you write the custom objects, your code will likely be fragile for a variety of reasons. ObjectiveCLIPS allows you to write rules about your objects and execute actions when rules match."

It was a nice departure last week, to write about not so serious matters, in order to make fun of everything and everyone (including myself). Today, however, it's back to more serious matters (if you can call computer matters 'serious', of course): Amiga OS4. Or how it will fail utterly if Hyperion/Amiga Inc. don't get their heads out of the sand. Note: Sunday Eve Column.

BusinessWeek explores why the chance is right for Apple to license the Mac OS to 3rd party hardware vendors. "First, the caveats: there's as much chance that Apple will license the MacOS as there is that Steve Jobs will show up to his next keynote wearing a dress instead of the usual attire. Secondly, he's probably right not to change course, because there's plenty of evidence that Apple's proprietary approach is the way to go to win the huge consumer electronics and digital media markets that are now opening up. But humor me anyway, because it's actually an interesting time to consider the question."

"In this tutorial I will describe how to set up a highly available NFS server that can be used as storage solution for other high-availability services like, for example, a cluster of web servers that are being loadbalanced. If you have a web server cluster with two or more nodes that serve the same web site(s), than these nodes must access the same pool of data so that every node serves the same data, no matter if the loadbalancer directs the user to node 1 or node n. This can be achieved with an NFS share on an NFS server that all web server nodes (the NFS clients) can access."