Thom Holwerda Archive

Why FreeBSD; Guide to PC-BSD

The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth. Elsewhere, here is a guide to PC-BSD.

Visopsys 0.56 Released

Visopsys is an alternative OS for PC-compatibles. Version 0.56 is a maintenance and bugfix release, with important fixes to eliminate potential boot problems, faulty EXT2/3 mounts, and problems with the detection of secondary hard disks. Important multitasker improvements related to process initialization have also been back-ported from the 0.6 development branch. Download page and changelog.

Amiga Turns 20

20 years ago on July 23rd the Commodore Amiga was unveiled at the Lincoln Centre in New York. For the launch Commodore had hired Andy Warhol & Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie) to demonstrate the Amiga's graphics capabilities. Despite many dificulties the Amiga is still around today both as a company and as a community.

SWT and JFace, Part I/II: a Gentle Introduction

In part I of this series, you get introduced to Eclipse, the Eclipse SWT, and the JFace GUI tool kits to construct Eclipse and stand-alone rich GUIs. also introduced the basic label, text, and button GUI controls, and the composite, group, and shell container types. Part 2 shows you how to create simple Standard Widget Toolkit applications using Java technology, Eclipse, and the SWT and JFace libraries.

XYNTService Open Source Admin Tool for Windows

Running a background process on the Windows platform requires running a Windows Service. To run a Windows Service, you must have an application that is Windows Service aware. A Bash script is not Windows Service aware and neither are many console applications. XYNTService allows an administrator to define a console program and its options to execute. The XYNTService application is a Windows Service that reads a configuration file to know which applications to run. Read more...