Thom Holwerda Archive

"Classpath hit 98% of 1.4 , and I think we'll see another big bump tomorrow since the XMLEncoder patch went in . I think we're in the 90s against 1.5, though it is hard to say since there hasn't been a branch merge in quite a while. Of course, japi isn't the final word on how we're doing, which is why Mark is going to talk about this at FOSDEM. The coming year looks as though it will be a very good one for gcj and Classpath. I think we'll finish 1.5."

"Parallels officially released its Workstation 2.0 product at the end of 2005, entering in the desktop virtualization market where VMware, Microsoft and Serenity Systems International are already. Parallels Workstation 2.0 raised a lot of attention because is the first time a desktop virtualization product features the hypervisor technology. In the following interview Benjamin Rudolph talks about Parallels 2006 roadmap, mentioning enterprise virtualization products and touching hot topics like Microsoft Vista Aero support and Apple MacOS x86 virtualization."

The port of the OpenSolaris kernel to the PowerPC architecture ('Polaris') is now complete. As stated on the Blastware website: "Ladies and Gentlemen, The OpenSolaris kernel for PowerPC has been built." One of the bigger hurdles to having a full-fledged port of OpenSolaris running on your PPC hardware has now been taken.

The first draft of GNU General Public License Version 3 will be unveiled next week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., but that milestone is likely to be more of a beginning than an ending. The release of the draft will kick off months of debate over the content and exact wording of the license that will govern much open-source software for the foreseeable future.

"Familiarity breeds contempt, right? So it stands to reason that anyone who uses a product extensively can find fault with it. I'm no exception - my work requires me to use Mac OS X every day, all day long, and although I am generally thrilled with its capabilities and reliability, some things about it really drive me up the wall."

DragonFly BSD 1.4 has been released. "The two biggest user-visible changes in this release are a major revamping of libc, ctype, and wchar support, as well as changes made in the kernel which require us to bump the major rev for all of our shared libraries, and the introduction of PKGSRC to manage third party applications. DragonFly no longer supports the FreeBSD PORTS system." Get it here.

"This is a detailed tutorial about the steps to set up a Ubuntu based server (Ubuntu 5.10 - Breezy Badger) to act as file- and print server for Windows workstations in small workgroups. This howto uses the tdb backend for Samba to store passwords and account information. This is suitable for workgroups for up to 250 users and is easier to setup than an LDAP backend."

"An Intel-based iBook has been widely trailed to be unveiled next week. If you're anticipating speeds and feeds ahead of next week's keynote, we'll have to disappoint you. But sources close to Apple suggest that the many in the rumor mill have failed to illuminate the bigger picture - a strategy to makeover the iBook as a cut-price bait to lure switchers, with price points much lower than Apple has ever risked for a portable machine. In many ways, the strategy is risky, but with rival PC notebook laptop prices in freefall - Dell today offers a $499 notebook - Apple may not have any choice but to embrace it."

DualCor will ship its dual-CPU PDA-PC combo in March, the privately held start-up revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today. The company's cPC combines a Windows Mobile 5.0 system running on a 400MHz Intel PXA263 with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition running on a 1.5GHz VIA C7-M processor. Both processors take separate partitions of the machine's 1GB of DDR 2 SDRAM and 1GB of NAND Flash but share the 40GB hard drive, allowing documents created by one OS to be accessed by the other.

"PBIs have the advantage of being entirely self-contained. That means casual users won't inadvertently overwrite existing libraries or files by installing and uninstalling applications. This article shows how to create your own PBI, using Digikam as an example of a rather complex package with many library dependencies. While most PBIs will be easier to generate, I want to demonstrate most of the gotchas you may run across when generating your own PBIs." In addition, here is an article explaining how to get MS Office running via WINE on FreeBSD.

"Linux follows the philosophy that every thing is a file. For example, a keyboard, monitor, mouse, printer... You name it and it is classified as a file in Linux. Each of these pieces of hardware have got unique file descriptors associated with it. Now this nomenclature has got its own advantages. The main one being you can use all the common command line tools you have in Linux to send, receive or manipulate data with these devices."

Open source experts have hit back at a study published by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team that said more vulnerabilities were found in Linux/Unix than in Windows in 2005, labelling the report misleading and confusing. The report has attracted criticism from the open source community. Linux vendor Red Hat said the vulnerabilities had been miscategorised, and so could not be used to compare the relative security of Windows and Linux/Unix platforms.

The latest version of Portable OpenOffice.org, an edition of the open source office suite that fits on a USB stick, includes a number of updates such as full support for Windows 2000 and launchers for each OpenOffice.org application. Portable OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 includes all the applications included in OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 and takes up only 144MB of storage space, compared to the 300MB of disk space required by the full version of the office suite. But 144MB is still too big, considering that many USB sticks only store 256MB, according to Gary Barnett, a research director at analyst firm Ovum.

"Linux is not Windows, and although there are some similarities, you must realize that there may be a few 'new ways of doing things' to learn before you can be comfortable in Linux. Linux is an open-source clone of UNIX, a secure operating system that predates DOS and Windows and is designed for multiple users. The items in the following list generally apply to any UNIX-based *nix system, such as Linux and the various BSD's. For the purposes of this article, assume that it's all Linux."