Thom Holwerda Archive

The Southern California Linux Expo announced today that Peter Quinn, former CIO of Massachusetts, will keynote at the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo. Quinn's keynote will be the opening presentation at SCALE's Workshop on the OpenDocument Format in Government Organizations.

The update to the GNU GPL 2.0, which was some five years in the making, was released this week for a year of public commentary. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the current license, sat down with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to talk about his aims, hopes and wishes for the new license.

"All HP blades now support Sun Solaris 10 in 32/64 bit but that's only the beginning. HP's Opteron DL145-G2 is now certified for Solaris 10 32/64 bit too, and sources suggest there's a lot more to come. We'd say that OpenVMS for Opteron is a bridge too far for Hewlett Packard, but additional support for Sun Solaris 10 suggests a degree of cooperation that would have been totally unconceivable two years ago."

"If building infrastructure is the true forte of Free/Open Source Software, why is there so much duplicative efforts to build so similar edifices seen in Office Suites? Would it not be better to put the initial efforts into construction a software scaffold as the first fundamental step in building the structure to allow all suites components to be placed upon it from any interested source? While I do not consider myself a competent software architect, conceptually the proposal in the previous sentence seems reasonable. Moreover, it could attract talent that is more attuned to fundamentals of process control, i.e. information exchange rather than the attributes seen in a keystroke binding to an action upon a gui that a class of users expects from an application."

GNOME 2.13.5 has been released. As always, the odd-numbered branches indicate dev-branches, and as such the 2.13.x series is the step-up to the GNOME 2.14 release, planned for March this year. Release notes: platform, desktop, and bindings; downloads: platform, desktop, and bindings.

Two more articles on Apple's Intel iMac today. "Disassembling the first fruit of the Apple-Intel alliance raises some interesting questions about the model's profit margins." Secondly, PCMag reviews the new iMac: "The differences are all under the hood. The 20-inch new iMac combines a dual-core Intel Core Duo processor with the Mac OS X experience. Casual Mac users, switchers from Microsoft Windows, and iPod aficionados will love the new iMac; however, professionals and people who use graphics apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro should hold off until the critical app is updated to work smoothly with the Intel processor. For these people, we recommend holding on to your current G5-powered Mac, at least for now."

With the next Itanium chip, Intel has abandoned a feature it once banked on but that never proved successful. Circuitry to let Itanium run software for x86 chips, such as Pentium and Xeon chips, is not present in the forthcoming 'Montecito' processor, according to the 176-page reference manual (.pdf) for the chip published this week. Update: El Reg has more on this story.

"The Java based lightweight implementation of the Internet Engineering Task Force Secure Shell protocol provides secure remote log-in and other secure network services over an insecure network. The protocol has three major components: Transport Layer, User Authentication and Connection. The implementation is lightweight due to using the highly optimized cryptographic library IBM CryptoLite for Java, efficient buffer and I/O handling, memory reuse to avoid excessive garbage collection, and threads are not used."

Genesi has launched their EFIKA developer's program. The EFIKA is a "performance evaluation board based around the MPC5200B PowerPC system-on-chip from Freescale Semiconductor" The only thing you need to do, so it seems, is post a possible use for the EFIKA board on a thread on Power.org.

A set of banchmarks has proven that under some conditions, WINE can beat Windows XP SP2 at some tests. To be exact, out of 147 tests, WINE beats Windows XP on 67. The WINE version used was 0.9.5, running on a Gentoo Linux system, with some fairly decent hardware.

LinuxHelp reviewed Gentoo, and in spite of being a lot of work to set up, Gentoo offers something unique few other distributions are able to offer:"One thing I found unique to Gentoo was the knowledge gained by the user in the process of installing it on the hard disk. And if you are an experienced Linux user/administrator, it will be a revision time well spent."

"In the past month, there's been much ado about Xen in the online community, both from developers, columnists and the SearchOpenSource.com audience at large. First Xen was given the green light to become an open source killer app, thanks to the work done by companies like XenSource with its XenOptimizer 3.0 upgrade. Meanwhile, some users and analysts said the technology was unproven and had a ways to go before the killer app label would fit."

"Since the first rumors of an Apple switch to Intel, everyone has been wondering about the potential speed of Intel-based Macs. Last week's announcement of the first shipping Intel-based Macs brought with it the promise of a major speed boost: Apple's Web pages suggest that the new iMac, powered by the Intel Core Duo processor, is twice as fast as its G5 predecessor. Macworld Lab's tests do show that the new Intel-based iMac is faster than the iMac G5 when running native applications. However, we found that those improvements are generally much less than what Apple claims is a 2x improvement in speed."

GNU/DOS 2006, the latest version of the FreeDOS distribution, has been released. New features include an easy installation/upgrade, package management utilities, the MTXE screen saver, Arachne GPL version 1.89, OpenGEM Release 5, vim 6.4, and other updates. Download it here.