Thom Holwerda Archive

The government-run Central Trust of China has mandated for the first time that all desktop computers purchased from now on must be Linux-compatible, demonstrating the Chinese government's desire to widen the nation's usage of open source software. "It is a global trend that Linux is gaining wider adoption due to its lower costs and better adaptability," Mike Lin, a consultant at the Taipei Computer Association, told the Taipei Times yesterday. Note: This article is about the Republic Of China (Taiwan) and not The People's Republic Of China.

In a comment on the Power.org blog, Pieter Van den Abeele wrote that Genesi will be releasing the Open Server Workstation, which will be based on the PowerPC 970 (G5) chip. The system is scheduled for release this month give or take a few weeks, and will cost $1599. Developers can also register for a free workstation.

T2 SDE 2.2.0-RC has been released. "T2 SDE is not just a common Linux distribution - it is a flexible open source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with bleeding edge technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation. Currently the Linux kernel is normally used - but we are expanding to Minix, Hurd, OpenDarwin and OpenBSD - more to come." This new release adds, among many other things, support for Intel Macs.

Both sad and good news from the Haiku front. The sad news is that Rudolf, known for his hard work on bringing (accelerated 3D) drivers to BeOS, has posted on his blog that he wants to focus more on 'real life': "I have to follow this new path unfolding before my eyes. It's my destination. It's real life. I love it, I need it. So, I'll no longer work on all those drivers much. Maybe even I'll quit alltogether." Sad for BeOS, but happy for him. A heartfelt 'thank you' for his hard work is deserved. As for the happy news, Seamonkey and Romashka now run on Haiku.

Adobe, not content with Microsoft's decision to cut certain PDF functionality out of Office 2007, also wants changes in Microsoft's new document display and printing technology. Will the pair's failure to resolve differences result in more antitrust action?

As was to be expected, a flurry of reviews of Ubuntu Dapper Drake, released yesterday. LinuxForums reviews Ubuntu and Edubuntu/Kubuntu, while ReviewLinux sticks to just plain Ubuntu: "Dapper Drake is a huge step forward since Breezy Badger. I was impressed in many ways. The package management got even better than before. The artwork is fantastic. The networking features are great. Gnome is fast and responsive, and the desktop is full of little applets, applications and shortcuts which make it very easy to do most common things."

"Firefox 1.5.0.4 is a security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version." You guessed it, general bugfix and security fix release.

The Dogtail and Autobuild automated certification and testing tools will be offered to customers as part of Fedora initially, but could become a commercial value-added service in the future, Red Hat's CEO said at a conference this week. Red Hat is on track to ship its Enterprise Linux 5 by the end of the year but certification, testing and standardizing the testing process have become more important to customers than the operating system, its CEO said.

The popularity of Apple Computer's iPod digital music players is helping it sell more Macs, but so far it hasn't been enough to spark a rise in the company's share of the personal computer market. According to research firm Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totaled 57 million units in the first quarter of 2006, representing a 13.1 percent increase over the same period last year. But in that time, Apple's share of the worldwide market slipped from 2.2 percent to a mere 2.0 percent.

AMD on Thursday laid out plans to serve 30 percent of the market within the next two years, with new quad-core processor designs scheduled for 2007 and an acceleration of its manufacturing capabilities. The company also talked about plans to build future processors with the ability to mix and match the building blocks of a chip to cater to different needs, and to allow its partners to add co-processors that can link directly to Opteron processors through AMD's Hypertransport links.

Polypaudio is a relatively new cross-platform networked sound server project. The first release came out in July, 2004, the software has been released under the LGPL. "Polypaudio is a networked sound server for Linux and other Unix like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESOUND)." The main function of a sound server is to allow multiple audio applications to simultaneously share the same sound card, the networking capabilities extend this ability across machines.

"It's not that I despise Apple or the wonderful products it showcases year after year, but the fact that almost every first generation Apple product has serious quality assurance issues bugs me beyond belief. Let's take a look at two of Apple's most successful products, the company's portable music player and its notebook series."

"Last week's announcement of Microsoft's new virtualization strategy at WinHEC 2006 conference brought in big interest. The importance of the announcement and the technical complexity of the products (the so-called Windows hypervisor will be integrated in the operating system itself) also raised customers' confusion, now trying to understand how the new products will address problems they today are solving with Virtual Server. Mike Neil, Virtual Machine Technologies Product Unit Manager at Microsoft, accepted to sit down with VirtualizationInfo and clarify some important points about Windows Server Virtualization, Virtual Machine Manager, the Softricity acquisition and more."

"In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_cband on an Apache2 web server. mod_cband is an Apache 2 module which provides bandwidth quota and throttling. It solves the problem of limiting users' and virtualhosts' bandwidth usage. The current version can set virtualhosts' and users' bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultanous IP connections."