Thom Holwerda Archive

With the free Turbo Explorer line, Borland brings programming to the masses. Each of the four Turbo Explorer 'personalities' targets a different combination of programming language and platform: Turbo Delphi and Turbo C++ for Windows, and Turbo Delphi and Turbo C# for .NET. There are over 200 components for building programs, but the abundance of features may be overwhelming to new users.

During the past month the official software update sources for VectorLinux suffered from several long time downtime periods. As a result, users were unable to update or install new software. This article explains a possible fix using trusted mirrors.

"So most of us have read review after review on just how fantastic Ubuntu is. And you know something, they're right - this really is a fantastic Linux distribution for the newer Linux enthusiast. But there often times appear to be some confusion as to accomplishing tasks they once would do in Windows pretty easily. On the whole, the confusion stems from hardware compatibly issues and today we are going to look into resolving those issues with ease." Don't look at me concerning that weird sentence. I have no idea how to make it grammatically correct.

Marc G. Fournier has launched a new project with the intention to show hardware vendors that there in fact are a lot of BSD users out there. "We are trying to demonstrate to hardware and software vendors out there that BSD should be viewed as a serious operating system, not just as a hobbyist system, for support (i.e. hardware drivers) purposes."

"Jon Ellch was one of the presenters of the now infamous 'faux disclosure' at Black Hat and DEFCON last month. Ellch and co-presenter Dave Maynor have gone silent since then, fueling speculation that the entire presentation may have been a hoax. Ellch finally broke the silence in an email to the Daily Dave security mailing list over the weekend, and one thing is clear: he is chafing under the cone of silence which has been placed over the two of them."

"Can't wait to upgrade your Windows XP machines to Vista? eWEEK Labs tests show that a clean install is the faster, less-problematic, option. While our upgrade experience was fairly good, we recommend that administrators opt instead for a clean install, teamed perhaps with Vista's Windows Easy Transfer utility for carrying over files and settings from the previous install."

DistroWatch has brought to light an apparant fraud by Freespire. "Several readers have emailed us to let us know that Linspire has launched what can only be classified as an attempt to tamper with our page hit ranking statistics by trying to artificially inflate the page hit ranking figures for its new community distribution - Freespire. Upon investigation, it turned out that both linspire.com and nvu.com had been deceivingly redirecting visitors to the Freespire page on DistroWatch and that the default home page of Firefox in the latest build of Freespire had also been set to the same page." A thread on the Freespire forums about this issue is quite heated.

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running. This article gives a brief overview of the field.

Microsoft's Windows Vista RC 1 is done. Now it's up to the estimated 6 million testers to which the company is planning to release the code to determine if it really is ready for prime time. Microsoft has posted the RC 1 build, Number 5600, on its TechBeta Web sites for select technical beta testers, including TAP partners, on September 1. Microsoft is planning to broaden the beta to include up to six million participants, total, some time next week, according to industry sources. Cnet has a video introduction to Vista RC1. Elsewhere, people are going bonkers over Vista's... Start up sound. Major Tom to ground control?

The Ubuntu team has released the 2nd alpha release en route to Edgy Eft. "The primary changes from Knot 1 have been implementations of feature goals as listed on this page. Common to all variants, we have upgraded Xorg to the 7.1 release. In Ubuntu, GNOME has been updated to 2.16.0 Release Candidate 1. Other notable changes are listed on here. KDE has been updated to 3.5.4. Other notable Kubuntu changes are listed on here."

"The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (codename sarge). This update mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update."

Yesterday we reported on the transcript of an interview with Stallman at the GPLv3 conference; today, FSF-Europe has posted the transcript to Stallman's actual presentation, including audio and video material. Yes, yesterday's item had the wrong title, in case you're wondering (it said transcript of RMS' talk, instead of 'just' an interview); it is fixed now.

"The Apple III was meant to be Apple's bold entry into the business market; it ended as Apple's first commercial failure and put the company into financial uncertainty. It was also responsible for sprouting both the Lisa and Macintosh projects, efforts that would save Apple."

"Twilight is an imperative, object oriented, general purpose programming language. The guiding principles of Twilight are simplicity, practicality, and orthogonality. It is a language which is easy to learn and to be productive in. An experienced programmer in Python, Java, C# or C++ will be able to pick up Twilight in a short period of time."