Thom Holwerda Archive

Windows Vista SDK Goes Live

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Windows 9 Comments

"Welcome to the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit for Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1. This edition provides documentation, samples, header files, libraries, and tools designed to help you develop applications and libraries that target Windows Vista Beta 1."

Word Processors Compared: OOo Writer, AbiWord, and KWord

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Office 44 Comments

OpenOffice.org receives most of the attention among FOSS office suites, but users shouldn't forget that free software includes at least two other word processors: AbiWord, and KWord, part of the KOffice suite. From their inception, both have been playing catch-up with OpenOffice.org's Writer. But now, after several years of development, AbiWord and KWord are both reaching early maturity. How do Writer, AbiWord, and KWord compare?

Intel Tools on the Way for Mac Coders

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-24 Intel 9 Comments

Intel said that it plans later this year to offer test versions of software tools aimed at allowing Mac developers to improve the performance of programs that run on its chips. The software maker said that later this year it will offer beta versions of both its compiler and its performance libraries, which contain code optimised for both digital media and scientific computing tasks.

NetBSD Announces Timelines for Two Upcoming Releases

Submitted by Geert Hendrickx 2005-08-24 NetBSD 15 Comments

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for October 2005; NetBSD 2.1 for the middle of September 2005. These dates are of course subject to change.

Optimize for SSE

Submitted by hakime SEDDIK 2005-08-24 macOS 8 Comments

Vector programming doesn't stop with PowerPC. Learn how to do SIMD vector programming for MacOS X for Intel. This page provides an overview of the hardware and programming interfaces involved, and provides detailed translation help information for leveraging your investment in AltiVec forward to the SSE world.

Linux-on-Mac Seller Aims to Fill Void

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-23 Linux 35 Comments

When Apple Computer announced in June that it planned to move to Intel chips, one of the companies left in the lurch was Terra Soft Solutions. This week, Terra Soft is announcing it has filled some of the void created by Apple's move. Under a new deal, Terra Soft will resell PowerPC-based servers from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's XR9 systems use the same G5 chip as Xserve, but at 2.4GHz, the chips are slightly faster than those used in Apple's servers.

Submitted by kellym 2005-08-23 Intel 39 Comments

During his keynote address at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Otellini unveiled the company's next-generation, power-optimized micro-architecture for future digital home, enterprise, mobile, and emerging market platforms aimed at a new category of converged consumer devices.

Getting Started with launchd

Submitted by Hakime SEDDIK 2005-08-23 macOS 25 Comments

In Tiger, Apple introduced a new system startup program called launchd. The launchd daemon takes over many tasks from cron, xinetd, mach_init, and init, which are UNIX programs that traditionally have handled system initialization and prepared the system for the user. These venerable programs are widely used by system adminstrators, open source developers, managers of web services, even consumers who want to use cron to manage iCal scheduling, and they can still be called with launchd.

Review: Freespire 5.0 – Linspire Freed

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-23 Linspire 51 Comments

It seems that a free Linspire clone has hit the ftp mirrors. DistroWatch reports: "Freespire is a new Linux distribution, a free edition of Linspire with all proprietary components and trademarks removed. The distribution comes with a free repository of over 1,500 packages available via apt-get and Synaptic. This initial release functions as a live CD only and serves as a proof of concept. It certainly looks like an interesting idea: combining the benefits of Linspire's excellent usability and hardware auto-configuration with a free repository of Debian packages." Review.

Submitted by dbprice 2005-08-23 Solaris 17 Comments

Solaris Express 8/2005 (Nevada Build 19, thanks for clearing that up, Dan) was posted today, providing improved hardware compatibility, a IEEE1394 camera driver, improved USB support, support for USB smartcard readers, and roughly 600 bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

Sun Announces Open-Source DRM Project

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-22 Oracle and SUN 35 Comments

Sun Microsystems, weighing in on the fractious issue of protecting copyrighted digital content, on Sunday announced a project it calls the Open Media Commons initiative aimed at creating an open-source, royalty-free digital-rights management standard.

Torvalds Weighs in on Linux Trademark Row

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-22 Linux 42 Comments

Linux founder Linus Torvalds is defending protection of the Linux trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation. He explained that the "cease-and-desist or sublicense the mark" letters are a requirement of maintaining a trademark. "Not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even the Linux Mark Institute has so far historically always lost money on it."

Submitted by DKR 2005-08-22 Apple 67 Comments

Apple's switch to Intel could lead to a merger that spawns a big power player in the personal computer, home media, and entertainment industries. Apple has already made great advances, so what could they possibly do next that would allow them the potential for yet another large surge of hype, buzz, profit, and success? Intel is already the most dominant chip manufacturer, so what could they possibly do next that would make them bigger, badder, with more diverse profits and services?

Submitted by kellym 2005-08-22 KDE 21 Comments

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change.

Microsoft Buffs Sparkle ‘Flash Killer’

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-22 Microsoft 22 Comments

At its upcoming Professional Developers Conference next month, Microsoft is set to shed more details on its developer-oriented graphics tool, code-named Sparkle. Sparkle will be one element of the upcoming Expression Studio suite of design and developer tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly known as Avalon. Expression Studio also is expected to be unveiled at the PDC, sources said.

Submitted by shaen 2005-08-22 ReactOS 35 Comments

ReactOS 0.2.7 has been released. The ReactOS homepage hasn't been updated yet to reflect the release, but you can download it from their SourceForge page. You can get a live-CD, install CD and a Qemu-image. Update: screenshots.

Submitted by Rahul 2005-08-22 GTK+ 56 Comments

"The primary goal of Project Ridley is to cut down on the number of problem libraries that are part of the GNOME platform. We propose to do this by moving functionality into GTK+, wherever it makes sense. These libraries are generally small, undermaintained, and buggy."

First Looks into Gnome Power Manager

Submitted by lotso 2005-08-22 Gnome 12 Comments

"We all know that power management in Linux isn't all that it should be. All this is changing with the rise of Gnome Power Manager. This short article will show the progress we have made on the gnome-power mailing list, and the result of all the hard work from the various people contributing to the list. I'll cover what progress we have made, and detail some of the packages that exist at the moment."

A Piece of CherryPy for CGI Programmers

Submitted by anonymous 2005-08-22 General Development 6 Comments

CherryPy uses the same concepts as CGI to bind a Web server to a Web application, but it improves performance and gains persistence across requests by handling all its requests within a single process. Find out how to write Web applications with CherryPy, an application framework for Python that makes Web applications easier to write than plain CGI.

Improve PowerPC Stack Solutions on Linux

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-22 Linux 6 Comments

Systemsim970 written in C, is a full-system simulation infrastructure and tools for the PowerPC 970 instruction set built upon the IBM Power architecture. It provides a Linux full-system simulation to develop, run, and evaluate PowerPC software stack solutions in the absence of PowerPC system hardware.