Thom Holwerda Archive

For the past few years, the V2_OS project was nearly dead. Things are about to change as the project is getting reorganized. The new website is nearly ready and the source code was moved from Sourceforge, back to the real server. Development of the complete rewrite (version 0.70) is expected to restart in the following days. For those who do not remember V2_OS, this is one of the first operating systems written in pure assembly language.

"QEMU is an open source cross-platform emulator for Linux hosts. It allows you to emulate a number of hardware architectures (x86, x86-64, and PowerPC are currently known to work, with others, including SPARC and MIPS, in development). QEMU thereby lets you run another operating system on top of your existing OS. Going through the process of installing and configuring QEMU not only gave me a worthwhile new software tool, but also helped me learn a few things about Linux."

PPCNux (German) as well as Pegasos-Forum (German) report about new information about Genesi's new G5 based mainboard. The mainboard which will feature the PowerPC 970MP CPU will have the new microBTX format (26.4x26.7cm/10.4"x10.5"). As system controller IBM's 945 northbridge was chosen which is the corresponding version of the current PowerMac's system controller. ATI will provide the graphics chipset for the new mainboard. It is currently not known which product name the mainboard will have. In addition, Mupper 1.0 has been released.

"There have been a couple of runs at trusted operating systems in the past, but the difference between what's out there now and what we're announcing is that, in the Linux world, we'll have trusted capabilities in a standard distribution," said Paul Smith of Red Hat.

CosmoPOD offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE's Kioskstyle.html framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor.

"When choosing an operating system for use in your enterprise, you need to look beyond the security capabilities 'on the box' and think about how the OS really affects you over the long haul. You need to be prepared for the patching, upgrading, and maintenance issues each OS has and understand how these activities affect your security and availability."

The OpenSolaris desktop community released an opensource version of the Java Desktop System. "The Java Desktop System is a secure and comprehensive enterprise desktop software solution that combines the best of open source innovation. Java Desktop System is a major component of the Solaris 10 Operating System, x86 and SPARC architecure editions, and an earlier release is also available with a Linux OS."

"It's not often that you see a desktop operating system aimed at power users. Usually an experienced user is expected to build the operating system from the command line ala FreeBSD, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, or Linux From Scratch. Either of those options can take hours of research, config file hacking, and software downloading and installing. Mandriva Linux PowerPack Edition is quite a departure from both of those scenarios."

Pixel, the image editor that works on just about every platform imaginable (not my TI-83 though, and where's that Zaurus port?), has been ported to SkyOS, and will be available in the next alpha of the beta or beta of the beta release of SkyOS v5 beta. You can view a screenshot here. This port was possible because of the recent port of the Freepascal compiler 2.0.0 to SkyOS.

Yet again hell freezes over. As if Apple's switch to Intel wasn't enough, Sun has announced that IBM is going to sell Solaris on its blade servers. "IBM has agreed to sell Sun's operating system with its BladeCenter servers in "the coming months," according to an IBM spokesman. This is quite the surprise given IBM's contentious relationship with Sun. IBM's services organization, however, does do a large amount of business selling Sun servers and Solaris, which may have helped seal the deal." Jonathan Schwartz announced it in his blog as well.

"Since we wrote a yarn about how opening OpenOffice was slower than a Lada full of elephants going uphill, we have had a few tips from our readers as to how to speed it up. The changes are not difficult and do seem to have an effect. We can't be certain how much this will affect the functionality but we pass these ideas on."

Herb Sutter, a software architect from Microsoft, gave a speech yesterday at In-Stat/MDR's Fall Processor Forum. Addressing a crowd mostly consisting of hardware engineers, he talked about how the software world was ill-prepared to make use of the new multicore CPUs coming from Intel and AMD.

In the business IT shop of the near future, open source software will gain equality with proprietary software, but it won't get there on its own power, said Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. "From the beginning, we have never been religious about open source. We think it's the most effective way to produce software, but we've always realized that there are vendors that will stay with closed source products. Our users live in the real world where both open source and closed source software have to work together."

"There have been a few recent PowerPC announcements that have caused the Mac Faithful to wonder anew about The Switch and the "real" reasons behind it. First, there was the 970FX announcement, which clearly showed that IBM is capable of putting out a 970 processor that compares quite well with the Pentium M in performance/watt. And then there's the 970MP, which Apple has used to make a monster of a quad-processor 64-bit RISC workstation. To make matters even more interesting, P.A. Semi has just announced a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC processor SoC that, if the specs and numbers are to be believed, could take PowerPC to a whole new performance/watt level."