Thom Holwerda Archive

Microsoft said it has sold 100 000 copies of its Windows XP Starter Edition, the first indication of the popularity of the low-cost operating system.

Opera Software today released the second upgrade to Opera 8. The new version, Opera 8.02, is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and includes security upgrades and smaller bug fixes. Download & changelog.

Building on two previous articles -- Three ways to connect a database to a Geronimo application server and "Dive into EJB Web applications with Geronimo" This article will show you how to develop a stand-alone (fat) client that can communicate with an EJB application running inside the Geronimo application server.

Every year most Linux hackers attend a conference where they talk about all those topics only kernel hackers talk about. Papers of all the talks are now available, with a wide range of topics: NTPL, XEN, page cache performance, I/O scheduling, future ext3 development, VM, and more. Also, as every year, LWN's excellent kernel summit coverage is now freely available.

Based on Debian Linux and promoted by Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Linux has gained a loyal following since it's inception. Today we'll be taking a look at Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and see what this South African based distribution with a global appeal is all about.

"When I initially published the article, Boot Fedora Linux Faster, neither my server or me was ready for 22k visitors in one day. It seems that there is a great interest in the topic of reducing boot time. So I think a challenge is in order to get Linux people together to try to reduce boot time."

Microsoft released it's much anticipated Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 today, but only to MSDN subscribers and a pretty small set of pre-enrolled beta test participants. FlexBeta goes inside the new beta.

"In this article I describe my experience with Mandrake/Mandriva and try to explain why it suits a starter in Linux and is still a usefull distro when you get more experience." Note that ReviewLinux.com has adopted a very confusing way of browsing through the article: you need to use the tabs on top.

In June 2005 the Ecma General Assembly approved the third edition of the standards for C# and CLI. With the first edition of the standards in 2002 and their adoption by ISO/IEC in 2003, the industry was given powerful tools to enable vendor-neutral development of Web services. Today, Ecma is keeping pace with the growing needs of the developer community by publishing the third edition.

Today, Microsoft released the first beta of Windows Vista. PC Mag reviews it. "After several years of waiting to see the successor to Windows XP, code-named Longhorn, we've finally gotten our hands on Beta 1 of what now will be called Windows Vista." They also have 40 screenshots. Elsewhere, MS has announced the official names for Avalon and Indigo.

Yesterday Firefox's dowloads reached it's 75 million mark. That's 25 million downloads in less then 3 months, well above all previous expectations. Due to its imense popularity and the upcoming release of Firefox 1.5, the team is hoping to reach 100 million downloads in the next 2 months.

FreeBSD has been ported to the XBox. "Over the last 2 weeks, I have been working on a port of FreeBSD for the XBox. The port is fully functional. The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard). Only ethernet is missing, currently." The FreeBSD on XBox website is here, downloads included.

The Extensible Firmware Interface, which could speed the boot-up process for PCs, has been handed over to a group that will promote and standardize it.

Beta 1 of Windows Vista, formerly known as Longhorn, will be released coming wednesday. The download will be available to beta testers an hour after the official announcement.