Thom Holwerda Archive

It seems that some well-known users are switching from MacOS to Linux, often after a lifetime of involvement with Apple's products. From Tim Bray's blog: " as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn't beautiful anymore."

Despite having been on the market only a few months, ultramobile PCs, the keyboard-less handheld computers capable of running Windows XP, have already been panned by analysts and many reviewers. Now they're being targeted by the likes of Sony and startup OQO, who are offering their own diminutive computers for businesses. But Microsoft and partners - the UMPC has been backed by Intel and VIA Technologies - expect to see more diversity in the UMPC space in the near term.

Vista is supposed to be faster, more reliable, and more secure. The result is that you can't assume your older Windows apps - particularly the ones you wrote - will work. DevSource.com's John Mueller points out where the bodies are buried in Vista's graphics, security, hardware, and third party applications, and where to start digging.

After several months of work, research, and a massive platform change, The Gnu-HALO Project (formerly BSD-HALO) has finally released a proof-of-concept alpha bootable ISO to the public. It is now based very closely on SLAX Linux for the time being, and there are plans to keep software binary compatability as the project matures.

"Centos is an enterprise class Linux distribution that is built from the sources of Red Hat . It performs very well as a server as well as a workstation. This guide will show you how to quickly install and configure Centos as a server with Apache 2, Qmail and Proftpd on an x86 (32 bit) system."

Linux Format has a short interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman, the well-known Linux kernel hacker behind many drivers and the USB subsystem. Greg explains why drivers aren't a popular area of kernel development, how the kernel is stabilising in 2.6, and the impact of the SCO lawsuits.

ReactOS 0.3.0 RC1 has been released. Get it from the download page; the changelog doesn't seem up yet, so no information on any improvements. As for the code audit, it is at 90.5% complete. Read the associated Wiki page for more information.

The Linux kernel version 2.6.17 has been released. Not a lot of changes since the last -rc; the bulk is actually some last-minute MIPS updates and s390 futex changes, while the rest tend to be various very small fixes that trickled in over the last week. The changes are listed at KernelNewbies (don't look at me for the name).

The Debian Administration website gives a small tutorial in using the new desktop notification deamon included in GNOME to create simple desktop popups. "There are several times when you'll be writing a script, or a program, which needs to communicate with the desktop user and here we'll look at two of the more modern approaches."

This is the 3rd installment in my series on deficiencies in common desktop environments. After GNOME and the Mac/MacOS, it is now KDE's turn. As with the other installments, this is a rant. Beware.

A new paper from a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, "The Potential of the Cell Processor Scientific Computing" , explores the performance of IBM's Cell processor on some specific types of code commonly found in high-performance computing applications. The paper compare Cell's performance on these kernels to the performance of the Cray X1E, AMD Opteron, and Intel's Itanium2. The idea here is that Cell will be a commodity processor (at least that's what the authors and IBM hope), so it'll be a viable HPC alternative for the cost-sensitive academic research market. This paper represents the first formal academic attempt to decide if Cell hardware is something that researchers will want to invest in. So how does Cell stack up in comparison to these three competitors? In a word, it screams.

"Alky is a tool that allows you to convert a Windows executable to a Mac OS X or Linux binary. We are focused on high-end gaming at the moment, though we will support other applications in the future. Our binary translation layer is already working fully for OS X and Linux support is in progress. Of course, Windows applications use a very different set of libraries from Linux or OS X applications so we are also working on a library called LibAlky that will provide those Windows libraries to the application." One of the project's members is Cody Brocious, one of the developers behind PyMusique.

Red Hat has published some of the keynotes from the Red Hat Summit. "We've barely had time to unpack our suitcases, but we did manage to bring back a few party favors from this month's Red Hat Summit. Watch the keynote speeches, get updates on our announcements, and take a taste of Music City, open source style."

"The Interchange File Format (IFF) standard is widely regarded as long dead, and indeed, no one uses it anymore, except that nearly everyone uses it sometimes. Many believe the IFF standard is an Amiga graphics standard, and certainly, there have been a great many graphics files saved in the IFF format. However, IFF is not just a graphics format. It has been used for graphics, audio, text, saved games, and more. Electronic Arts actually developed the standard, back when it was a software company and not just a video game company."