Thom Holwerda Archive

Earlier this month, much of the handheld world was stunned by the sudden announcement that PalmSource was being bought by Japan-based Access. It wasn't surprising that this company was being acquired, but most people had been expecting the buyer to be Palm.

"Plan B is an operating system designed to work in distributed environments where the set of available resources is different at different points in time. Plan B 3rd edition is a modified Plan 9 system. Therefore, any experience with Plan 9 will help you to install and use Plan B. Because Plan 9 inherits from UNIX, any experience with UNIX will help as well."

This tutorial, first in a series, will walk through installation of a bundled Apache Tomcat and Jakarta Slide that will result in a working content management system. In Part 2 of this series, learn how to download the sources, set up Eclipse, and build the Jakarta Slide open source CMS. Part 3 will walk through the customization of Jakarta Slide with Eclipse to create a new store back-end adapter that will allow documents stored to Slide to also be stored in a database. Other options for creating stores will also be explained. Note that a free registration is required to view these articles.

"Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download, completely free of charge, here." This news got submitted a staggering 14 times, and as far as I know, that's a record.

Toshiba said today it would offer Cell-based hardware development kits in April 2006. The reference platform comprises Cell and support chips and is geared toward "digital consumer products and communication equipment that draw on the powerful broadband capabilities of the Cell microprocessor" and its "unsurpassed multi-tasking and real-time processing functions", as Toshiba put it.

An updated release of PC-BSD is out. From the changelog: "PC-BSD 0.8.1. Fixes many issues with boot-up after installation; fixed problems with Online Update Manager; updated UserManager; added Russian and Bulgarian support; activates hard disk swap space during installation for lower memory systems; slimmed down KDE 3.4.2 by removing games/graphics/PIM ports, which can be optionally installed via PBI." See also the release notes for further information. Download from here.

As expected, Sun said its new Sun Fire V490, V890, E2900, E4900 and E6900 servers are powered by UltraSparc IV+ processors with a clock speed of 1.5 gigahertz and run Sun's latest version of its Unix operating system, Solaris 10. The servers will also run earlier versions of Solaris.

On Monday, the Free Standards Group released the latest version of the Linux Standard Base, Version 3.0, and announced that Red Hat, Novell, the Debian Common Core Alliance and Asianux are all certifying their latest operating systems versions to it. Update: In a recent post on his blog, Red Hat's Ulrich Drepper makes some criticisms of the LSB and its shortcomings of the v3 certification process.

In previous Windows releases, the entire audio stack ran in Kernel space. Vista will put an end to this. "The first (and biggest) change we made was to move the entire audio stack out of the kernel and into user mode. Pre-Vista, the audio stack lived in a bunch of different kernel mode device drivers, including sysaudio.sys, kmixer.sys, wdmaud.sys, redbook.sys, etc. In Vista and beyond, the only kernel mode drivers for audio are the actual audio drivers (and portcls.sys, the high level audio port driver)."

"OpenBSD is an ultra-secure, freely available, multi-platform BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. And is arguably the most secure operating system in the world. After using OpenBSD for over 9 years I decided to place online some useful information for first time users of OpenBSD. The information here covers the current release of OpenBSD."

Red Hat announced on Monday at Oracle's OpenWorld in San Francisco that Oracle, EMC and Network Appliance now support its Global File System. The file system is based on the several technologies obtained by Red Hat in its 2003 purchase of Minneapolis-based Sistina Software. Red Hat then worked on the code and open-sourced it in June 2004.

"The growing popularity of open-source browsers and software may be responsible for the increasing gap between the exposure of a vulnerability and the provision of patch to fix it, security software vendor Symantec has said."

Microsoft' professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week was perhaps the company's most important event of the year, as officials try to sell developers on the value of creating new applications for the company's next generation of products. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked with eWeek Senior Editor Peter Galli at the show about these upcoming products.

"Microsoft has tried to radically change the design philosophy behind its office suites from 2003 to office 12. The difference between the interface of Office 12 and Office 11 (2003) is nothing short of staggering. The attempt has been to enhance the user’s ability to actually get to the function he wants to use quickly and without getting lost in the labyrinth of toolbars and menus." You can find info on beta testing Office 12 here. In related news, the slides from the PDC presentations are now available for download.