Thom Holwerda Archive

Can the Zeta LiveCD Be Installed?

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-09 Zeta 14 Comments

"I've been working off-and-on writing a review/overview of the Zeta LiveCD, but one topic in particular kept distracting me: the question of whether or not the demo CD can be installed and run from a hard drive partition. My experimentation ended up growing into an article of its own and the short answer is 'no'. For all the gory details, read on."

Eve of Expo: Rumor Recap

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-09 Apple 13 Comments

I'll promise this will be the last set of rumours about His Steveness' MacWorld keynote tomorrow. "With Macworld Expo San Francisco 2006 set to kick off Tuesday, Think Secret presents a compilation of information we have received and reported over the last number of months concerning Apple's anticipated announcements."

Hands on with Google Pack

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-09 Google 16 Comments

"During its first-ever appearance at the CES, Internet search giant Google unveiled two initiatives, both of which are aimed, in part, to counter Microsoft, the company it considers a primary competitor. The first is called the Google Video Store: users of this service will be able to buy and rent a wide range of video content online, including prime-time and classic TV shows from CBS, NBA games from this season and the past, Sony BMG music videos, and news and historical content from ITN. The second initiative, and the focus of this review, is Google Pack. Google describes Google Pack as a free collection of safe, useful software from Google and other companies that improves the user experience online and on the desktop."

Classpath Hits 98% of Java 1.4

Submitted by anonymous 2006-01-09 Java 31 Comments

"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."

Interview: Benjamin Rudolph of Parallels

Submitted by Alessandro Perilli 2006-01-09 OS News 9 Comments

"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."

ATI PowerPlay Benchmarked

Submitted by Michael Larabel 2006-01-09 3D No Comments

"Introduced in ATI's v8.19.10 proprietary display drivers for their RADEON series was support for PowerPlay. For the uninitiated, ATI's PowerPlay allows the user to specify various 'power-states', or rather various frequencies and voltages at which the card can operate. The purpose for these various performance levels is ultimately to allow mobile users to save on battery life through running at reduced speeds when not performing strenuous 3D tasks."

OpenSolaris Kernel Built for PowerPC

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-08 Solaris 16 Comments

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.

Debate Looms for GPL 3 Draft

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-08 Open Source 22 Comments

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.

Will My Applications Work on Windows Vista?

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-08 Windows 20 Comments

"One of the big concerns of anyone considering moving to Windows Vista is 'How many of my applications will work on Windows Vista?' We have spent a lot of time trying to answer that very question for our company so I will share with you some of the common problem areas we found for applications to help give you an idea of what applications might have problems for you."

‘Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X’

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-08 macOS 132 Comments

"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 Released

Submitted by Lazarus 2006-01-08 BSD & Darwin 8 Comments

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.

What About Atom Chip?

Submitted by carlosdf 2006-01-08 Hardware 48 Comments

The CES ends today, yet we have heard nothing from the Atom Chip corporation-- the company who's claims generated a lot of disbelief six months ago. They promised to show their exceptional technology at CES-- yet no news has surfaced. Is it now safe to call their claims outright lies and deceit? Update: More, including photos, here.

Ubuntu File, Print Server For Windows Workgroups

Submitted by Falko Timme 2006-01-08 Ubuntu 21 Comments

"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."

Apple Walks Tightrope with Budget iBook Strategy

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-07 Apple 76 Comments

"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."

Microsoft Challenges Linux’s Legacy Claims

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-07 Rumors 141 Comments

The study described in the following article was done by Mirosoft, so run to the kitchen and get some grains of salt. "Microsoft's Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively "put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything." Do with the results as you please, but the topic is interesting nonetheless. What are your experiences?

Handheld PC Runs Two OSes on Two CPUs

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-07 Wireless 9 Comments

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.

Building Binary Packages for PC-BSD; MS Office on FreeBSD

Submitted by BSD_User 2006-01-07 PC-BSD 10 Comments

"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.

Googles Announces Google Pack, Video-on-Demand

Submitted by Adurbe 2006-01-07 Google 16 Comments

As expected, Google on Friday announced several new products. "Google Pack, a bundle of software from Google and other companies that was announced by the Web giant on Friday, is aimed squarely at consumers. But Google's goal is to be the front end for everything people do on a computer, and enterprise use is not far off, analysts and solution providers said." Google also enters the video-on-demand business: "Google announced a service Friday that will let people rent or buy downloadable videos online, including classic and contemporary CBS television shows and NBA basketball games."

Input / Output Redirection Made Simple in Linux

Submitted by Bjorn 2006-01-07 Linux 8 Comments

"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."

Red Hat Disputes CERT Vulnerability Figures

Thom Holwerda 2006-01-06 Privacy, Security 125 Comments

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.