Thom Holwerda Archive

"I've been hacking on and off with W. Michael Petullo on integrating LUKS into the GNOME desktop via HAL and patches are now upstream. I think it rocks. I've prepared a small screencast." What exactly is LUKS? "LUKS is the upcoming standard for Linux hard disk encryption. By providing a standard on-disk-format, it does not only facilitate compatibility among distributions, but also provide secure management of multiple user passwords. In contrast to existing solution, LUKS stores all setup necessary setup information in the partition header, enabling the user to transport or migrate his data seamlessly."

OliveBSD is a live CD based on OpenBSD 3.8. It uses IceWM as its desktop environment (using ROX-Filer as file manager), and comes with the usual suspects when it comes to software. Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Gaim, Xmms; they require no introduction. There are enough screenshots in there, boys and girls, so enjoy.

Will Microsoft's forthcoming Vista OS support legacy applications written in VB6? Microsoft plans to answer that question in detail about a month from now, a timeframe that happens to coincide with the one-year anniversary of a petition from developers asking for better support of the traditional VB environment during the emerging .NET era. But for now, MS is willing to say that when Vista goes out the door, Microsoft will extend mainstream support for the VB6 runtime by another six or seven years, through the end of the Vista lifecycle. The same won't be true, however, for the VB6 development environment, which left mainstream support for extended support in mid-2005.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Download from one of the mirrors.

A new version of RISC OS 5 is today available via Castle's Internet based update distribution software. RISC OS 5.11 contains bug fixes to the Iyonix's ethernet networking driver, EtherK, to address a fault with stalling connections - as seen occasionally in ShareFS. The USB stack has been tweaked to support USB radio projects and similar software. The RISC OS Flash ROM image was also built using optimisations included in the latest publically available version of the Norcroft C/C++ compiler, as sold by Castle. RISC OS 5.11 is a stable release, unlike its earlier cousin 5.10, which saw the introduction of improved Nvidia card handling during the start up of the computer.

Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes, but users of Apple's OS X platform could pay a hefty price if they continue to live in denial, industry observers have warned. The biggest security vulnerability could lie in the fact that OS X users aren't "trained" to monitor and identify social engineering tactics that have been used against Windows-based users for years. Mark Borrie, IT security manager at New Zealand's University of Otago, said although he hasn't experienced any infections, he's concerned at the ease in which social engineering can be used against the Mac community.

"We reported a few days ago that we had Linux booting on the Intel-based Macintosh. We have been looking at Linux on this hardware some more, and we are glad to report that we now have a full-fledged Knoppix distribution working, complete with the X Window system. We are releasing the first pictures of Knoppix 4.0 running on a 17-inch iMac Core Duo. The X Window system is shown running at full resolution (rather, fuller resolution - 1472x900 - notice that the bottom right edge of the KDE dock is cut off). Most (but not all) aspects of the hardware seem to work, but we have yet to analyse exactly what doesn't work and assess how much work it might take to get such things working."

"Valgrind is a CPU simulator which is used by KDE and many other projects to profile and debug our programmes. In the interview below Valgrind author Julian Seward talks to KDE Dot News about why he developed Valgrind, how you can use it and, most importantly, where the name comes from."

"The Fedora Project announces the third release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid." The final release is planned for March 15th. Release notes will be uploaded soon, and download locations are listed in the release announcement.

"Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first certification authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine." One of the more interesting quotes: "With Ubuntu, it's still too early to say we've been successful. My personal goal is to make the distro sustainable - then there will be a team that pays its own way and can focus on producing the best free software desktop on the planet without my interference!"

According to a benchmark, Sun's Niagara processor is over 4 times faster at serving dynamic PHP pages than a dual Xeon server. "We did real production benchmarks using different servers. Servers were put into production behind load-balancers, then weights on load-balancers were changed so we got highest number of dynamic PHP requests per second. It must sustain that number of requests for some time and no drops or request queue were allowed. With static requests numbers for Opteron and T2000 were even better but we are mostly interested in dynamic pages."

"Introduced in 2007 , aerolitheOS will be our successor PC operating system for OS/2 Warp and thus a new alternative for users who have intentions to change their current platform. Our operating system is a full 32-bit protected mode OS that is binary and API compatible with OS/2 Warp. The OS will be used on our Aérolithe PC systems, even if its use is not restricted to these machines. It is extreme compact and reliable and ideally suited for embedded applications. Additionally, it is designed to be highly adaptable so that it fits the requirements of desktop and network computing." Scepticism abound, though.

"The IEEE and The Open Group have granted permission to the NetBSD Foundation to incorporate more than 1400 interfaces from the joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX standard and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6 into its NetBSD operating system. This step benefits developers in the NetBSD Project and software engineers using NetBSD as their target platform. NetBSD developers can now use standard documentation to express that a NetBSD operating system conforms to the POSIX standard. The step also gives engineers who write software to run on NetBSD a better understanding of how to create portable programs using IEEE 1003.1."

Jim Starkey, the original creator of InterBase, which became Firebird, just made it publicly known that he now works for MySQL AB. "My company, Netfrastructure, Inc., has been acquired by MySQL, AB. As part of the agreement, I will be working full time for MySQL. I expect to lurk on the architecture list from time to time and may contribute the occasional wolf-o-gram, but I will not be taking an active part in Firebird development. Although Ann will work for MySQL, part time, translating from wolf to English, she will continue to be active in the Firebird project."