Thom Holwerda Archive

Screenshots are available of Mandriva's 2006.0 beta, following the release announcement. "This live CD is a complete Mandriva Linux system, which you can use directly from the CD or install on your hard drive. It includes OpenOffice.org, KDE, Firefox, GIMP, Amarok, etc."

"Is Dell is on its way to becoming the first tier-one PC vendor to offer a mainstream business Linux desktop to US customers? It's starting to look that way. Dell has started advertising a trio of affordable workstations with RHEL WS 4 preinstalled."

"Yesterday, I got Qt running on top of the Glib main loop. By using the QAbstractEventDispatcher API, I was able to completely replace the entire event dispatching mechanism of a Qt 4 application with less than 600 lines of code. What does this mean?"

"SWsoft Virtuozzo for Windows is deadly simple to install and manage, with extended virtual servers' centralized management features, and enhanced provisioning capabilities. Anyway you should consider that OS partitioning is different from virtualization. Virtuozzo is less flexible than any VMware or Microsoft virtualization software and you won't be able to consolidate different platforms, or migrate some of them when the new Microsoft codename Longhorn Server will come."

"Trying to combine JSF and JSP is like trying to shoehorn a foot into a glove: it's possible, but it's really just a stopgap measure until something better comes along. In this article, JSF enthusiast Rick Hightower introduces you to what he likes best about Facelets: easy HTML-style templating and reusable composition components."

"Most Linux people don't know much about JBoss, the open source firm reported in talks with Oracle about a $400 million purchase. That tops any free software deals I can recall. Novell paid $210 million for SUSE in cash. So, what about this JBoss company? They did it without any initial outside funding, generated revenue and self-funded and stayed true to open source 100% while selling services."

Geek Patrol benchmarked a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook G4. Not surprisingly, they concluded: "The MacBook Pro outperformed the PowerBook G4 in almost every benchmark. Since all of the MacBook Pro's baseline scores are over 100, it even outperformed our baseline system, a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz! The only benchmark where the PowerBook G4 outperformed the MacBook Pro, Stdlib Allocate, depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance. If you're upgrading from a PowerBook G4 (or even an early Power Mac G5), you'll certainly notice how much faster the MacBook Pro is, especially with multi-threaded applications."

David Reveman of Novell shares his thoughts on Xgl, Metacity, and more."I've been getting a lot of mail from people asking me about my thoughts on AIGLX, the GL compositing work being done on Metacity and nVidia's xdevconf paper. Instead of replying to everyone individually, I though I'd send a mail to the Xorg list."

NexentaOS has released alpha 3 of their OpenSolaris-based Ubuntu distribution. This new version includes OpenOffice.org 2.0 on both the live CD and the install CD, a storage subsystem, and OpenSolaris kernel build #34. Download locations.

One week after releasing Mac OS X 10.4.5 to the general public Apple has dropped the first seed of the next Mac OS X update on developers. The update currently delivers about 50 documented improvements, including several OpenGL-related fixes, improvements to CoreImage and CoreGraphics, and other bug corrections for iSync, AppleScript, and other components.

Asus has shelved plans to develop the PC of the future - literally. The Taiwanese vendor's Green PC concept computer, shown to Reg Hardware this week, is just that: a shelf. And some clever wireless connectivity and non-contact inductive power source.

Apple has phased out its 15" PowerBook G4. The PowerPC-based notebook has been removed from the company's online stores in the UK and the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, even as the first Intel-based 15" MacBook Pro machines began to be delivered to buyers.

"In my last tip, we set up a single internal YaST Online Update server to pick up updated software from the SuSE mirrors. Now, we're going to answer the question: how do clients connect to the server? In setting up the single internal YaST Online Update server, the idea was to minimize the load on the existing mirrors by having one machine hit the outside servers, instead of however many client machines you have, and enhance security by keeping updates inside your firewall."

"ATI's R5xx line was first released back in October 2005. The initial launch covered the X1800 and X1300 series, with the X1600 series following suit in November. Last month we saw the release of the new X1900 series too. Now, let me count the months from October to February; it is 5 months, right? Well, believe it or not, that's the number of months the new X1000 series is out in the market without Linux support. If you are unfortunate enough to own such a card, all you have is Matthew Tippett's statement in Phoronix."