Thom Holwerda Archive

Excel Software began shipping QuickHelp 2.0 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. QuickHelp is a development tool for creating and deploying application help on Windows 95 through XP, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Linux.

BeBug, the Belgian BeOS User Group, made a trip to YellowTAB's headquarters in Mannheim, Germany. They talked to various people inside the company, including CEO Bernd Korz. Lots of pictures inside. Elsewhere, HaikuNews has a short interview with the developer who ported the BeOS 3D accelerant to RISC OS.

"On the whole, I bought the story too, although I know that it won't all go smoothly. Anyone who owns or is considering buying a Mac has to have questions; these are what I think the answers are."

"Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs has a reputation for thinking different. But now he might be planning a move for Apple that will leave even his biggest fans surprised--becoming a phone company." Read more at Forbes.

As seen on Slashdot: "At a very late stage Addison Wesley decided not to publish my book, 'The New C Standard: An economic and cultural commentary' I am making the pdf freely available. You can download the pdf (mirror). The organization is rather unusual in that the commentary covers each sentence of the C Standard (actually the latest draft of C0X, excluding library) one by one (all 2022 of them)."

Compared to Panther, the Mac OS X 10.3 system software, Tiger exhibits broad performance improvements. It's noticeably faster at booting the system and loading applications. PDF rendering and all text and graphics rendering is faster with Tiger on late-model Macs. Elsewhere, the new IBM chip could serve a PowerBook G5, but is it too little too late?

Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu will remain fully supported for an extended period of time.

Sources close to Mandriva, Progeny and Turbolinux say the trio of companies will be announcing a new enterprise Linux distribution based on Debian Linux at the LinuxWorld event in San Francisco in August.

More and more projects use the browser as a primary means of communicating with the program. The main drawback of this approach is that it requires the user to configure and maintain his own Web server, or else requires the program to come bundled with a Web server. Jetty is simple for both programmers and users, making it a good choice for bundled web server.

SuSE 9.3 is the most polished and easy to use release from SuSE. It goes a long way in dispelling the notion that Linux is not ready for the desktop. It is a comprehensive release with enhanced hardware detection and configuration and an exhaustive suite of available applications.

IBM has today presented various new versions of their G5 processor at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan. Firstly, it introduced the much-anticipated PowerPC 970MP, the dual-core version of the G5. In addition, they also announced 3 low-power G5s, ranging from 1.2Ghz at 13W to 1.6Ghz at 16W. These processors will most likely find their way into Apple's Macs.

Can a Windows system and a Linux system talk together harmoniously? After all, there is a lot of work and personal data left on Windows PCs that many want to keep! So this question of networking the two systems is both reasonable and vital.

The second point release of the stable 2.10.x branch of GNOME is now officially released. This release has seen continued work to eliminate memory leaks, plain bugs and in general improve and polish the stable series of GNOME. Source: bindings, desktop, platform.

This is the first of two articles in which we describe how to acquire and build the source code for OpenSolaris. The first article provides all the necessary background information (terminology, where to get the tools, and so on) and describes a basic compilation and installation, and the second article will describe a more complicated compilation and installation.