Thom Holwerda Archive

Apple Threatens Websites Carrying OS X on x86 Videos

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-18 Apple 177 Comments

Apple's legal department this week sent "aggressive" emails to several web sites that support and advocate its products solely because they linked to videos showing a hacked version of the company's Mac OS X operating system running on off-the-shelf PC hardware. In addition, Apple released a fix for the 64-bit bug. This update is also available through Software Update.

SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 2 ‘Boston’ Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-18 SuSE, openSUSE 101 Comments

SUSE Linux 10.0 Beta 2 has been released. Changes since beta 1 include: OpenOffice.org is part of the distribution again (the Sun Java dependency is optional now), XEN3 support got added, Gnome was updated to 2.12 beta 2, Hotplug changed heavily, and KDE received work on multimedia system and the media handling. Download mirrors are here, screenshots here.

Can Linux Put PalmSource Back on Top?

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-18 Wireless 28 Comments

After a long stretch of bad news for a company whose software once turned words such as "PDA" and "Palm Pilot" into household names, PalmSource is finally showing signs that maybe, just maybe, it can field the right product, at the right time, to turn its luck around.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Colony 3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-18 Ubuntu 57 Comments

"Colony CD 3, the third milestone release of the Breezy Badger development branch, is now available. Our last milestone release was over a month ago, and there has been a lot of interest in testing Breezy, so we are pleased to provide this snapshot to the community for testing. It is available for download here." Screenshot gallery is here.

Submitted by Eraser 2005-08-18 General Development 4 Comments

"Some of the readers of my previous review of the Echo2 framework expressed concern that I didn't write a complex enough application to give it a fair shot. Fair enough, I just finished writing a new web application using the Echo2 framework, complete with input validation and database access using Hibernate for object-relational mapping." Read on.

Submitted by Nicholas Blachford 2005-08-18 Intel 47 Comments

"At next week's Intel developer forum, the firm is due to announce a next generation x86 processor core. The current speculation is this new core is going too be based on one of the existing Pentium M cores. I think it's going to be something completely different."

Servlet Cookbook with Cloudscape, Derby and Tomcat Recipies

Submitted by anonymous 2005-08-18 General Development 1 Comment

Cloudscape and Derby are relational database managers implemented in Java. Tomcat is the reference servlet container implemented in Java. This article is a cookbook, providing step-by-step recipes for integrating them in three common scenarios: the prototype integration, the casual integration, and the enterprise integration.

Solaris 10 Review: Sun’s Linux Killer Shows Promise

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-17 Solaris 177 Comments

If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap.

Submitted by rft183 2005-08-17 Zeta 18 Comments

"We are continually working on ZETA and many improvements and bug fixes are ready before we are ready to release a ServicePack or update. As we don't wish our customers to wait, we have decided to publish a selection of these on our website. This will give customers early access to updated drivers and applications." You can access the download section here.

Intel Swaps Clock Speed for Power Efficiency

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-16 Intel 56 Comments

Intel, which next week is expected to announce plans to move to a new processor architecture, is switching to a new yardstick to measure processor performance: performance per watt. Intel's announcement will publicly signal an internal shift that's already taken place. After years of promoting clock speed, it's now emphasizing overall performance and power-efficiency.

Tips: Porting Applications From Windows and Unix to Linux

Submitted by Jan Stafford 2005-08-16 Linux 35 Comments

Security, cost-savings, performance and innovation are the primary reasons to move to Linux, says Novell Linux developer evangelist Darren R. Davis, stating what is to him the obvious. Rather than dillydallying with that question, he'd rather help IT shops and developers get moving to Linux. Davis explains how to port Unix and Windows applications to Linux and how to make those Linux apps support multiple distributions in this interview.

Tour the Successful Geronimo Deployment Architecture

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-16 Java 4 Comments

Geronimo is one of the more complex projects undertaken by the open source community, comparable to Linux in its intricacy. One of Geronimo's principal goals is J2EE 1.4 certification - a time-consuming effort. Nevertheless, Geronimo has already issued several milestone releases and is moving steadily toward the magical 1.0 release. Peek behind the curtain and see how the Geronimo deployment model brings a number of different open source projects under one umbrella.

Solaris Express Community Release Build 20 Released

Submitted by Robert Milkowski 2005-08-15 Solaris 37 Comments

Solaris Express Community Release build 20 is out. You can download it here. It should be available on the OpenSolaris page soon. In addition, Sun Cluster 3.1 8/05 has been released. More info here.

Profiling and Optimizing Ruby Code

Submitted by anonymous 2005-08-15 General Development 19 Comments

If you're writing production code in Ruby and haven't been exposed to optimization strategies, take a look at this tutorial. Learn how to profile and optimize Ruby code (free reg. req.) with RubyInline and ZenOptimize, two tools that make this process easier.

Bruce Perens on the New Debian Common Core

Submitted by G_Decker 2005-08-15 Debian 41 Comments

MadPenguin interviews Bruce Perens about the new Debian Common Core Alliance. "As former Debian lead Bruce Perens discusses in this article, Debian has long played a central role in helping people all over the world share the fun, frivolity, fascination, and occasional frustration that is the world of free Open Source software."

NetBSD/i386 3.99.7 with KDE 3.4.2 Live-CD Available

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-15 NetBSD 21 Comments

This bootable ISO image contains NetBSD 3.99.7 and allows you to boot NetBSD/i386 -current without having to install to a hard disk. The LiveCD was initially intended to be a rescue cdrom, but is now capable of much more. KDE-3.4.2 and all kde3-i18n packages were included.

Review: SuSE 9.3

Submitted by Frank Schoep 2005-08-15 SuSE, openSUSE 86 Comments

Here's a review of SuSE 9.3: "Right now I'm looking at a SuSE 9.3 installation which offers me everything I'm used to plus more. It's hard to say if and when I'll switch, but it sure looks tempting. In more than one way SuSE feels so much better than Ubuntu, and it's hard to resist all the small details and finishes Novell put into the product."

Debugging Java Applications

Submitted by anonymous 2005-08-15 Java 8 Comments

The Java NetBeans IDE has plenty of support for troubleshooting and optimizing applications. Its built-in debugging support allows you to step through your code incrementally and monitor aspects of the running application, such as values of variables, the current sequence of method calls, the status of different threads, and the creation of objects. In this sample book chapter, you'll learn about NetBeans debugging features, so you can get your code working right as fast as possible.

OpenBSD Moves to 3.8-beta

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-14 OpenBSD 23 Comments

"OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt has bumped the version identifier from 3.7-current to 3.8-beta in CVS HEAD. Now is an especially good time to test snapshots."

Build Your Own Render Farm

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-14 Hardware 28 Comments

ExtremeTech explains how to build a rendering farm out of old computers. "At its core, a render farm is pretty simple: Seven or so machines on a network, a network-accessible storage location, a rendering app, and a queue manager. Putting it all together should be equally simple, right?"