Thom Holwerda Archive

Mobile browser-maker Access announced Friday that it will acquire Palm OS developer PalmSource in an all-cash transaction for approximately $324 million. The acquisition adds operating system platform expertise and Linux development resources to Access's existing "content delivery and Internet access software" for mobile devices, the companies said.

"Welcome to A Qt Blog. This is a blog I intend to feature announcements on developments in the Qt world: Qt itself, applications, publications, devices, as well as KDE, KDE-centred operating systems (particularly Linux distributions), and Trolltech affairs. I'd also like to have the occasional review and feature article on development and other topics."

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer delivered keynote addresses from the Microsoft Redmond Conference Center that were broadcast via satellite to customer events being held simultaneously throughout the USA and at major Microsoft subsidiaries around the world. You can find links to the webcasts here.

The first release candidate of OpenSUSE has been released. Product highlights can be found here. Please note that the final version is expected to be available October 6th.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA4. ISO images are available for i386, amd64, pc98, alpha, powerpc, and ia64. Sparc64 is still in the process of being built and will be uploaded as soon as it is ready."

One of the most useful tidbits from the basket of code released into the public domain this year by Sun Microsystems is likely to make it to the FreeBSD platform. DTrace is currently being ported to FreeBSD by Devon O'Dell, a FreeBSD developer working for OffMyServer, a US-based vendor which sells servers running BSD and Linux variants.

Here's a brand new series of tutorials (free reg. req.) to help you learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for system administrator certification exam 201, however they are of use to anyone willing to learn the fundamentals of Linux. These eight tutorials cover the Linux kernel, file and service sharing, system customization and automation, and more.

"With the real-time extensions, Java can now be used for safety critical systems. It is therefore primordial to be able to guarantee that virtual machine implementations not only conform to the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) but also that efficiency and predictability is up to a certain standard. With these objectives in mind, we developed and maintained a test suite (.pdf) which addresses conformance as well as performance."

Confirming long-standing rumours, Apple has today announced the iTunes-enabled phone together with Motorola in a special press event. The phone will automatically pause when you get a call, explained Jobs. The ROKR can only hold about 100 songs, according to Jobs. "The way we think of this phone is, it's really an iPod shuffle on your phone," he explained. "Both devices can shuffle, both can autofill, neither has a click wheel - but the phone has a display." Meanwhile, Microsoft joins hands with Orange to challenge Apple Motorola iTunes Phone.

Windows Mobile 5 sports many new features and enhancements making it a very worthwhile upgrade. Perhaps the most important feature that everyone will love is persistent memory. Your data won't be lost if the battery runs completely dry; a new concept for Pocket PCs, and an old one for MS Smartphones and some Palm brand PDAs such as the LifeDrive and Treo 650 (and the Tungsten E2). Read more for an in-depth look at this new Windows version.

Intel, AMD, IBM and all other chipmakers are doomed. In any case, that's the case if you were to believe the claims made by the Atom Chip Corporation, "which maintains it will show off a 2TB diskless notebook based on a 6.8GHz 'quantum-optical' microprocessor at next January's Consumer Electronics Show." Pictures of the notebook and various parts are available. Whether these claims hold truth is of course under debate, "but Gendlin (creator) has his patent - and more pending, apparently - and so we look forward to seeing Atom Chip's kit in the flesh at CES."

On Tuesday, the FSF announced the creation of the global "GPL Version 3 Development and Publicity Project," which will help create the next version of the General Public License. The Dutch nonprofit NLnet foundation is donating €150,000 to the cause. The new project is meant to bring together thousands of organizations, software developers and software users to help suggest revisions to the GPL.

MontaVista Software today announced the release of version 4.0 of its embedded Linux OS, MontaVista Linux Professional Edition. The new release is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel and includes hard real-time capabilities.

"We are pleased to announce a new developer snapshot of GNU Classpath. GNU Classpath, essential libraries for java, is a project to create free core class libraries for use with runtimes, compilers and tools for the java programming language."