Thom Holwerda Archive

While Vista Beta 1 is stealing most of the headlines this week, Microsoft also is delivering simultaneously on wednesday to a group of private testers the first beta of its Longhorn Server product.

Yesterday Firefox's dowloads reached it's 75 million mark. That's 25 million downloads in less then 3 months, well above all previous expectations. Due to its imense popularity and the upcoming release of Firefox 1.5, the team is hoping to reach 100 million downloads in the next 2 months.

Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET for Linux and other operating systems. In this article, Tim Anderson interviews project leader Miguel de Icaza. Why is Mono now partnering with Mainsoft to ease migration to J2EE?

The Extensible Firmware Interface, which could speed the boot-up process for PCs, has been handed over to a group that will promote and standardize it.

Sun Microsystems has distributed more than two million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System since the software became available on January 31st. These numbers, coupled with a record number of visitors to the Sun website during the last six months, highlight the incredible demand for the freely available operating system.

Microsoft is tightening the noose for those people running illegal or pirated copies of its Windows XP/2000 software on their systems. Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory for users of this Windows software to certify that their software is a genuine and legal copy before they will be able to receive any updates except security patches.

Everyone wants a quick boot time, from the beginner user to the advanced user, this is a issue that bothers us all. As Linux has advanced it has increasingly become slower to boot. So I decided to look into reducing the time it takes to boot my current setup, which is Fedora 4. In doing so I was able to reduce the boot time of my Fedora 4 installation to less than 25 seconds.

This recent article on Epiphany has garnered many comments, both on FootNotes and OSNews. This followup article addresses some concerns that have been raised about Epiphany.

Yesterday, the Open Sword Group released a beta of Pixen v3. "Pixen is the best program for the pixel artist using Mac OS X. Pixen is specifically for small-scale or pixel art; it shines better there than any other application. Not only that, but Pixen carries no price tag: it's open source under the MIT license and absolutely free." As far as I know, this is the only application of it's kind, with no equivelant on either Mac, Windows or Linux.

"I invite everyone interested to join the Utnubu Team. Utnubu stands for doing what Ubuntu does, just the other way around: We want to take the things Ubuntu does and that are missing in Debian, and - where appliciable - put them in Debian."

Microsoft's decision to call the next version of its OS Vista might have a raised a few smiles last week but one Redmond resident is less than impressed. The boss of Vista, a software and services company for small businesses is considering taking legal action against the software giant.

Yahoo has acquired software "widget" engine Konfabulator in a move to spur third-party developers to devise new applications for the Internet giant's services. Yahoo plans to run the widgets via XML feeds.

Distrowatch reports that a new beta version of Mandriva Linux 2006 appeared on the mirrors over the weekend. Like the first one a week ago, the new beta release, labelled as 2006 0.1.1, has not yet been officially announced, but the good news is that the mirroring problems we mentioned in last week's DistroWatch Weekly have been solved and the new release is now available from the usual Mandriva mirror sites. OSDir has a handful of screenshots.

Core Data Explorer is an interactive tool for browsing, manipulating and querying Core Data, the new object-oriented persistence layer in Mac OS X Tiger. It provides full object introspection, graphical browsers for objects and collections and a graphical interface for querying the Mac OS X persistent stores.