Thom Holwerda Archive

Richard Stallman explains why the European parliament should vote to keep software patents invalid: "Microsoft will be one of thousands of foreign software patent holders that will bring their patents over to Europe to sue the software developers and computer users there. Of the 50,000-odd putatively invalid software patents issued by the European Patent Office, around 80% do not belong to Europeans."

I have been using Open Office for about 8 months now for my word processing needs. In a nutshell I am satisfied. Last week the version 2.0 was released, I downloaded it as soon as it was made available, on first view, even though the key functionality in version 2.0 Beta remains largely intact, it promises dozens, possibly hundreds, of changes.

"We've all had this nightmare. You turn on your functioning Windows/Linux PC, and all you get is a blank screen, or a message telling you that certain files are missing, or the kernel has panicked for some obscure reason. Nothing works, and you need the data on your machine." A Linux rescue-cd is the solution.

A review of PC-BSD: "Now and then a new wind comes along in the ebb and flow of Linux distributions. OK, so I know PC-BSD is not Linux, but it's close enough. It's fair to say without going into technicalities and politics that BSD and Linux are cousins in the operating system world."

FUDCon 2, the second gathering of Fedora Users and Developers, has been held at LinuxTag, on the 24th and 25th of June in Karlsruhe, Germany. FUDCon 2 features presentations from prominent members of the Fedora Project, both from Red Hat and from the Fedora community. LinuxTag also has a nice write-up of FUDCon 2. The presentations are expected to be made available on the FUDcon pages soon.

With just two days to go before the expiration of mainstream support for Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, the software giant has provided an update rollup with more than 50 security patches and system reliability fixes. The Microsoft knowledgebase article provides more info.

After downplaying the importance of the emerging Ajax programming model, Microsoft Corp. has decided to jump with booth feet into the Ajax fray. On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled "Atlas," a Web client framework that is designed to support multiple DHTML controls with JavaScript code.

Eclipse version 3.1 is now available. New features added in this release: full support for Java 5.0 and improved support for developing rich client applications.

"Today, we are open-sourcing Sun's server side implementation of Java," Schwartz told an audience of about 10,000 software developers and Sun partners. "This is the first step in open-sourcing all of Sun's Java software assets." It will be released under Sun's CDDL.

In a long-awaited decision that could have stark repercussions for P2P networks, the United States Supreme Court on Monday gave record labels and movie studios a green light to sue file-sharing services such as Grokster and Morpheus, which maintained they were not responsible for the actions of their users.

Rexx is a scripting language that was invented at IBM years ago. The Linux community has largely ignored Rexx, but I believe it could play an important role in Linux's challenge to the Windows desktop. How can a language many in the Linux community have never even heard of be valuable in Linux's fight for the desktop?

Mesa3D has been imported into the Haiku sourcetree: "A first draft of Haiku's OpenGL kit started his life yesterday when I've imported large portions of Mesa3D's BeOS port into our source tree."

Gary Benson (Red Hat) has made available Jonas in the Fedora Java development list (screenshot). Along with the large number of free and open source Java packages made available in Fedora Core 4 already, more are being added to rawhide compiled with GCJ. These include Lucene, additional Jakarta components, and more. You can read the rawhide reports in Fedora Test to track the rolling development updates.

Many times, you need to know how a certain filesystem looked like at some point in time, and you want to be able to roll back changes that happened to it after that point. While there are multiple solutions to achieve this goal, certainly one of them is to use filesystem snapshots. One of the capabilities of unionfs is to offer the possibility of consistently freezing the status of the filesystem at any given point in time (snapshot). Read more...