Thom Holwerda Archive

"This article, the first in a three-part series, introduces you to the world of GTK+. It explains what GTK+ is, why you should consider using it, and the benefits it provides. Together with the rest of the series, this installment provides enough introductory information that, if you decide to use GTK+ in your own projects, you'll know where to look for further materials."

As here in Europe Christmas eve has already begun, we, the OSNews team, both editors and site maintainers, would like to wish all of our readers a very merry Christmas. May everyone be with the ones they love-- no matter one's nationality, religion, favourite operating system, favourite desktop environment, or whatever. Let us also hope the victims of the tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan, and Gulf Coast hurricane, and all others who have suffered this year, have found comfort. Let's have a moment of silence on the 26th for them. Merry Christmas, people (and anyone who dares to sing "Last Christmas" in the comments gets banned for a week) !

"Welcome to the MultiOS Browser Test Website. Here you will find capabilities to test your browser. You can test CSS, Document Object Model, Graphics file formats, iFrames, JavaScript, Browser plugins, SVG-Graphic, XML and XSLT." You can do these tests in English or in German.

"In this paper I will try to explain the philosophy behind the Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux). I will however try to explain the concept with an example but to keep the length readable I will restrain myself to go into much of implementation details for e.g. commands and similar stuff."

CoolTechZone claims that Microsoft has bought Opera. "In a recent conversation with one of our insiders at Microsoft, the source revealed that Microsoft has acquired Opera Software, makers of the Opera browser. The insider reported that both Microsoft and Google were trying to bid on Opera, but in the end, the software maker took the lead. At the moment, the deal is almost through with Microsoft and Opera planning on locations for the browser’s research and development centers throughout the world." Update: Opera has officially denied the rumours (thanks to Nemesis11).

Some five months after Google announced plans to open a product research and development center in China, and said it was appointing former Microsoft vice president Kai-Fu Lee to head the operation, the parties have settled the matter. In a brief statement released late Thursday, Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said the parties had entered into a private agreement that resolved all issues to their mutual satisfaction.

"I have already written about configuring my FreeBSD IPsec gateway and workstations. In this article I will show how I configured my Windows XP box to use the same gateway. You might ask why I'm writing about Windows XP on a website about FreeBSD? My terse answer is because I can. My realistic answer is because it will help people. It's something I did, with my FreeBSD gateway. I use XP on a regular basis. Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's XP. Sometimes it's FreeBSD."

"The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce version 0.2.9 of its operating system, designed to be binary compatible with Windows drivers and applications. This release brings improvements to the network model allowing applications such as firefox to run, significant improvements in Plug and Play support now provide a basic working model able to detect and load drivers, plus many other feature additions and bug fixes. We also now provide vmware player images on our download page. The full changelog can be found here, and screenshots are available here."

Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind HTML, the first web server (running on a NeXT cube), and the first web browser, has started his own weblog. From the first entry: "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights. Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space."

The Cairo vector-based graphics library now has a BeOS port, courtesy of Christian 'biesi' Biesinger. The Cairo library is used in Gecko 1.8 - the engine behind Firefox 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0 - for SVG and CANVAS tag support, although future plans involve it receiving heavier use for general rendering, and is also receiving increasing use within GTK+, with 2.8 having inital support for it. The availability of this library on BeOS should aid the native porting of GTK+ in the future as well as ensuring that Mozilla products have a future on the platform, and its almost certain to see wider adoption in the future.

eComStation 2.0 beta 1 is available for eCS Software Subscribers. The most significant updates on this beta version are: SNAP/ENT, the special licensed version of SNAP by Serenity is in there, we boot SNAP directly from CD-ROM; bootable JFS, this version is able to install on bootable JFS volumes; ACPI, this version installs and detects ACPI.

The European Commission has threatened to fine Microsoft up to 2m euros a day until it gives rivals more access to its systems. Brussels said the software giant had failed to supply adequate information about its server programs. Microsoft has five weeks to provide improved documentation before the daily penalties are imposed. But the company pledged to contest the EU's "unjustified" demands by whatever means possible. Update: Microsoft contests.

"The current Win32-based Windows UI graphics subsystem, found in Windows XP, has been around for nearly 20 years. It's aging and limited, and as a result, user interface development has been somewhat, well, constrained at best. The Windows Presentation Foundation, which is built on the .NET Framework, provides new techniques for developing applications, and makes better use of current hardware and technologies. In this article, we'll show you 10 of the most significant advances that make WPF superior to its Win32 forebears." In related news, here are shots of Vista server.

Sun has released the 1/06 update for the Solaris 10. You can check out what's new (whatever happened to ye good ol' changelog?) or download it (here I was going to put something about whatever happened to ye good ol' direct download, but nevermind).