Thom Holwerda Archive

Scanning in Geek History

OS News 5 Comments
For almost two decades, Jason Scott squirreled away thousands of pages of old advertisements, mailers, and brochures left over from the genesis of personal computing. Whether people see it as geek history or just junk, he now wants to share his stash with the world. Maybe Mac fans can't recall what that Apple II they considered so cutting-edge back in the mid-1980s looked like. Perhaps video-game aficionados forgot that Atari once pinned dreams of dominating the PC market on the now long-forgotten 1450 XLD computer. Scott's site can jog their memory.
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Apple Issues Updated Security Fix

macOS 15 Comments
Apple released another version of the security patch it distributed on March 13 to users of its OS X operating system software, in order to address a problem reported with the update. The company said it distributed the new patch, dubbed Update 2006-002 v1.1, in order to fix an issue with Apple's Safari Web browser that some users observed after installing its 2006-002 security update. According to a post on the company's Web site, the previous update had caused some Safari users to have problems launching the browser.
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Building a Virtual Private Server with Debian, OpenVZ

  Submitted by Falko Timme Debian 4 Comments
"In this HowTo I will describe the steps to be taken to prepare a server for OpenVZ virtual machines on Debian 3.1 32Bit Linux. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernal patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license."
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Fedora Core 5 Will (Temporarily) Break Non-GPL Modules

  Submitted by misha Fedora Core 62 Comments
Many Fedora users are anxiously waiting for the Fedora Core 5 release, scheduled for Monday, March 20. Be warned that some of you may have to wait a little longer, however: the kernel shipped with FC5 effectively disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules. That behavior was a mistake, and a fix has already been made, but it is too late to get that fix into the initial FC5 release. So binary module users will want to wait until the first errata kernel is released (a few days, at most) before upgrading. Update: Elsewhere, an interview with Greg DeKoenigsberg who presently serves as Red Hat's Community Relations Manager and is on the Fedora Extras Steering Committee.
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Installing Windows XP on Intel iMac

  Submitted by dhaneshr Apple 53 Comments
A very detailed how to for installing and running Windows XP on an Intel iMac have been posted on the contest website. And on a related note, someone who almost won the contest posted his findings too: "While I’m disappointed not to have won, I’m encouraged to see that our approaches were remarkably similar. We both wrote custom EFI CSM drivers to emulate the BIOS functions Windows requires to boot. I’m very curious how they managed to get VGA working, and I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t work in either the Mini or the Macbook Pro, as it looks like they did all their development on an iMac."
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Duval Details His Leaving; Mandriva’s CEO Replies

  Submitted by Anonymous Penguin Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 66 Comments
"Duval details his side of the story: "Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva 'thanks me' and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving." Mandriva's CEO replies: "Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off."
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Windows Performance Rating for Vista Examined

Windows 20 Comments
"The latest Community Technology Preview version of Windows Vista contains a new feature aimed at helping the average Joe and his friendly Best Buy shopping assistant figure out what kind of horsepower is needed to run the new OS. The rating consists of an aggregate total rating on a scale from 1 to 5 and a number of sub-ratings on a scale yet to be specified, broken out by hardware categories like processor, memory, video card, and hard drive."
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RiscPC Emulator Ported to Linux

RISC OS No Comments
Freely available RiscPC hardware emulator RPCEmu has been ported to Linux. Author Tom Walker released his program under an open source licence to Peter Naulls, who then crafted a Linux version and added in HostFS support from ArcEm - enabling RPCEmu to access files stored by the host operating system. RPCEmu, originally built for Windows users, is distributed with its source code included for other programmers to tweak and experiment with.
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Turning the Terminal Into Your Desktop

  Submitted by Valour General Development 119 Comments
"There are several possible reasons why you might choose to use the command line interface as your desktop environment. For one thing, it uses less electricity, so you could maximize battery life on your laptop computer. Secondly, it forces you to think about your operating system and directory structure in a totally different way than a GUI does; this could greatly enhance your understanding of GNU/Linux and cause you to be more creative in your technological problem solving. And thirdly, everyone will think you're a supreme computer genius for ditching X11 for the CLI. People passing by your desk will think you're some kind of computer god. Who doesn't want that?"
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Screenshots Showing Haiku’s Progress

  Submitted by jeanmarc Haiku 47 Comments
People love screenshots. It's probably because humans are a very visually orientated species. When it comes to software, people claim to be able to judge entire products, just by looking at a few screenshots. Especially for those people: 85 screenshots of Haiku running all sorts of applications. For the people who've been living under a rock the past 5 years: Haiku is an attempt to recreate BeOS as an open source product. And for the people who don't know BeOS-- click here.
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Red Hat Works to Make Virtualization Into Reality

  Submitted by MaxxTotal Red Hat 8 Comments
Red Hat announced several moves Tuesday to bring virtualization technology to the mainstream Linux market by the end of the year, a move that the company promises will dramatically increase server efficiency. The company already has promised to include a major virtualization component, the Xen hypervisor software, in its next premium product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5, due by the end of the year.
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Microsoft Fixes Office, Windows Flaws

Microsoft 4 Comments
As part of its monthly patch cycle, Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for six security holes in Office and one flaw in Windows. Five of the six vulnerabilities in Office are specific to Excel. The most serious flaws could allow an attacker to gain control over a vulnerable PC running the spreadsheet program, Microsoft said in Security Bulletin MS06-012. In all cases, the miscreant would have to persuade the user to open a malformed Excel file, the software maker said. The sixth problem affects a range of Office applications, including some versions of Word, Outlook & PowerPoint. Microsoft's second update deals with an operating system issue that affects Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003.
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Sun’s Rock Goes 16 Cores

Oracle and SUN 13 Comments
More details are available concerning the successor of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) processor. The Rock processor - due out in 2008 - will have four cores or 16 cores, depending on how you slice the product. By that, we mean that Sun has divided the Rock CPU into four, separate cores each with four processing engines. Each core also has four FGUs (floating point/graphics units). Each processing engine will be able to crank two threads giving you - 4x4x2 - 32 threads per chip.
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