Thom Holwerda Archive

Improvements to Spotlight searches, AirPort, Bluetooth, and RAW camera support are a few enhancements Apple reportedly has planned for an early winter release of Mac OS X 10.4.4 Update, a routine maintenance update to the Mac OS X Tiger operating system.

Novell's Linux investments are finally showing results as its Linux revenue of $61 million (EUR 52 million) jumped 418 percent from last year's fourth quarter. Novell announced its fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year financial results, which ended October 31, 2005, on Thursday.

The FreeBSD Foundation received a donation of a blade system from Hewlett-Packard for use as a third-party software build cluster. This 20-node HP BladeSystem cluster triples the speed of the build process for i386 packages.

"As time marches on and our lives become more complicated, it seems we have less and less time to devote to that free software project we started back in our idealistic youth. Rather than abandoning a good project due to lack of time, consider seeking out the assistance of other members of the free software community. With a few simple steps you can make it easy to find volunteers to help you complete your project."

"Recently, I got hold of a book named Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning (Tips and Techniques) by Steve Best. The book positions itself as a programmers guide to debugging and ways of increasing the performance of the programs that you write. The book explores the various tools that a programmer can access to iron out the bugs that crop up in the programs that he writes."

"Although we didn't consider it as such here today, Yonah will be quite impressive on notebooks. The thought of having such a cool running dual core processor in a notebook is honestly amazing, and the performance difference (especially for multitaskers) over what we have today will be significant. The other thing to keep in mind is that when you go from a single core to a dual core Pentium M notebook, you won't be giving up anything at all. On the desktop side, you normally give up clock speed for dual core support, but Yonah will be running at very similar frequencies to what Dothan is running at today. In other words, you won't be giving up single threaded performance in favor of multi-threaded performance - you'll get the whole package."

The next version of RISC OS Select will not be ready until after the new year, RISCOS Ltd.'s Paul Middleton has said. Speaking to the Bristol usergroup last night, the ROL boss handed out copies of a leaflet distributed at the Guildford show which includes a list of features for Select 4. It is understood that development is on-going, and developers who have previously contributed components to the RISC OS 4 subscription scheme have been contacted to work again on the project.

"Realm Systems has developed a portable computer likely to appeal to real geeks: a server so small it can fit in your pocket. This review is going to take a look at Realm Systems BlackDog. It is the smallest Linux server, weighing in at 1.6 ounces. It’s smaller than the size of a PDA and can be plugged into the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port of any computer running Linux, Windows 2000 or Windows XP."

Umeet Meeting 05 arrived to the sixth edition of the conference. The conference will take place online (IRC, WWW) on December, 9-20. We would like to welcome this time to everybody who wants to join us together with friends we met at previous editions. Registration and attendance is free. Speakers like Aaron Seigo (KDE), Rodrigo Moya (GNOME), Marcus Brinkman (GNU/Hurd), Rik Van Riel (Redhat), Alejandro Sánchez Acosta (GNU), Michael Meeks (OpenOffice), César Lopez Nataren (Mono), and other important hackers will be talking about the free software desktop, security and operating systems.

The Apache Geronimo application server supports Web services along with other aspects of the latest Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition specification. This article describes how to use Web services facilities provided by the Apache Geronimo application server to build Web services-enabled J2EE applications. It demonstrates how the Geronimo application server relies on robust support for J2EE standards, providing a number of facilities for building both Web services and their clients.

Here's an interview with Patrick Luby, the face behind the OpenOffice.org for Mac project. "I run my own software development consulting company called Planamesa Software. I have spent nearly a decade working as a software developer in a variety of commercial and open source projects including OpenOffice.org and Apache Tomcat using the C, C++ and Java programming languages on a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows."

Within an interview with The Swedish Association of Amiga User Groups (SAFIR) ACK Software Controls revealed some details on their WIP upgrade board for classic A1200 systems, which should come bundled with AmigaOS4.0 when available.

Reaffirming prior statements, Sun said that it intends to open-source its Java and N1 software at a later date. The free software will cover its Java Enterprise System set of server middleware, Java development tools and N1 management software. The move will create a single package called the Solaris Enterprise System. It will include Sun's Solaris 10 operating system, PostgreSQL open-source database, the Java Enterprise System server software and tools, Sun N1-branded provisioning and management tools, and Secure Desktop software.

The second beta of Vista will not come until next year. Microsoft did not give a time frame for the release of Beta 2 of the operating system, and said only that it would have more to say next year. MS had not said when Beta 2 will come, but some had expected it might come in December or January. More here, and here is a review of build 5259 that was supposed to be the November CTP, but actually wasn't (get it?). In related news, Microsoft has entered the beta period for Windows OneCare Live.