Thom Holwerda Archive

"This is a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) for configuring a virtual machine and installing on it Sun Solaris 10. At the end you'll be able to run the virtual machine inside Workstation 5.5 or inside VMware Player 1.0, which is a free virtualization product."

"I have always wondered what is it that makes people embrace Ubuntu over other Linux distributions. After some pondering, it struck me that the unique selling point of Ubuntu is its user friendliness. Ubuntu is a distribution targeted at the non-techie crowd - those that want to get their job done and not spend time tinkering with the OS. And consequently, the developers at Ubuntu have bundled simple easy to use GUI front end tools to achieve common system administration tasks. Here I have put together 10 things in Ubuntu that make a new user's life that much simple."

"For the last couple of years the community has been working to ensure that developers can create applications using Java without having to depend on proprietary software. Today, the Free implementations are already very capable and support a vast amount of functionality that developers expect from a Java-like environment. Important large applications like JOnAS, OpenOffice.org 2, Eclipse 3 and Tomcat 5 are known to work and now included in distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora Core. This document provides a road map of the various projects; how they work together, where they are, where they're going, and how we make sure that they work well and are compatible."

"After much digging online for an effective way to stop this pesky application that is highly de-centralised and a big pain to blocked, I finally found a way to do it. It has been working perfectly fine on our corporate network, and we have had no complaints of users being denied access to legitimate web destinations (that are in compliance with our security policy of course)."

"This release features new core components like the integrated mouse gestures, new Font system and API, new applications (Pixel Image Editor, ...) and various driver/system updates as well as more than 200 fixed bugs reported in our bug tracking system." In addition, the SkyOS team has decided that the version numbers got too confusing. Therefore, SkyOS v5 will now simply be named SkyOS. I might even start missing the "SkyOS v5 Beta 8.4 Alpha 1 of the 3rd Beta Released" headlines. In any case, here's the changelog.

"In 2005, Apple announced the Mac Mini. It was the answer to what I was looking for in a computer, so I bought one. This is a report about the early months with my new Mac, and how it compares to a Linux computer (I have never owned a Windows computer). In short, I am now both a Mac and a Linux user - Apple gets GUI simplicity, usability, and coherency right, and Linux everything else."

With speculation of a ship date for Windows Vista ranging in the second part of 2006, word has surprisingly surfaced that it can be expected much earlier. BusinessWeek has received a copy of the internal blog of Chris Jones, who is a top Windows executive. The blog states that the code for Windows Vista will be completed by August 31, giving Microsoft the opportunity to place Vista on PCs for the 2006 Christmas season.

A Dutch technology company has breathed life into a project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com, and instead offer single names which can be countries, company names or fantasy words. Such a system, which enables countries, individuals and firms to have a Web address consisting of a single name, offers flexibility and is language and character independent. "The plan is to offer names in any character set," said Erik Seeboldt, managing director of Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot.

Burton Smith, a longtime supercomputer designer and chief scientist at Cray, has resigned to take a position at Microsoft. Microsoft announced two weeks ago that it planned to introduce a new version of its Windows software for scientific and engineering users, and that Smith would be involved.

The $100 laptop designed by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and the One Laptop Per Child association, previewed at the World Summit on the Information Society conference in Tunisia last week, will be using a Redhat Linux variant as its operating system.

"I followed the debate about a successor for the C/C++ combination as the primary language for developing the GNOME core desktop platform very closely last month. There has been discussion about a number of options. What I would like to do on this page is give an overview how a probably less well-known language might be a viable compromise as a C/C++ successor. This language is called Eiffel and exists for over a decade. Eiffel takes the principle of Object-Oriented programming to its extremes and, as a consequence, is a very easy to learn language."

IBM's on-demand model is "crazy" and Open Source is "really a developer phenomenon" that does not stand comparison with "customer experience of Windows Live", said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, last week. In an interview, Fitzgerald said that there was no comparison between Microsoft Live, which offers on-demand features, and IBM's on-demand strategy. Elsewhere, references to free software and Linux were removed from a UN document after Microsoft claimed that such software aims to 'make it impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product'.

"If you want a desktop or laptop and you want to move to Linux then you're cooked. You have very few options and retailers have used low-cost Linux systems to bait and switch users. Unsuspecting PC buyers will be faced with the need to upgrade to Vista in the near future. So, that bargain PC from Dell will probably keep on costing you money. Do alternatives exist? We like to think so."

Open source behind closed doors: in the first of a two part series (part II) ZDNet looks at why some open source projects remain secret. "Lots of companies are using our products, they just aren't talking about it", is a popular excuse from software companies, particularly those that offer open source software and services. Deployment of open source software, particularly in the private sector, often appears to be a clandestine activity, with few companies prepared to discuss their involvement.