Thom Holwerda Archive

The Debian Common Core Alliance hasn't even been formally announced yet at LinuxWorld in San Francisco this week, and already one of its prospective members, VA Linux Japan, is explaining why it isn't joining.

Cygwin is a great alternative for those who feel constrained by working with the Windows environment. Cygwin lets you employ the best parts of each environment to fit your needs, whether through porting and development of applications, or simply using the applications in this flexible, powerful system.

This interview with Bill Hilf, Microsoft's Linux Lab Manager, answers questions from readers of Slashdot. It speaks about OSS inside Microsoft, attitudes towards open standards, and of course Linux. "Believe it or not, I use more different types of OSS here at Microsoft than I've ever used before. Our team uses over 40 different flavors of Linux and BSD, plus several commercial Unix variants."

FVWM, the F Virtual Windows Manager, is a window manager for computers running the X Window System. While KDE and GNOME offer more features, they are also heavy on memory usage. FVWM is light and fast, and you can customize it to meet your needs.

"I had been looking for some time to find a way to get the same type of Software RAID support under Windows that is available under Linux for my multiple USB-2 and Firewire drives. Then, I found the coLinux project, and discovered a way to have my Windows and my software RAID too."

In this first in a series of five tutorials, Ian introduces you to configuring your system hardware with Linux. By the end of this tutorial, you will know how Linux configures the hardware found on a modern PC and where to look if you have problems (free reg. req.).

"The Gentoo Foundation is both pleased and proud to announce the much anticipated release of Gentoo Linux 2005.1. Due to a scheduled power outage at the Open Source Laboratory affecting our master mirror, the release is currently only available for download via BitTorrent. We anticipate recovery from the downtime and full staging of release material to mirrors within 48 hours, accompanied by a comprehensive PR and ChangeLog." In addition, the Gentoo Installer reached their 0.1 release.

With Vista, Microsoft is addressing what's become a sad truth for most people: PCs run more slowly over time. Vista will automatically de-fragment hard disks, make better use of memory to more quickly load programs, and include a new performance control panel that will identify performance bottlenecks, according to the company. Elsewhere, ActiveWin hosts widescreen, high-res screenshots of Vista.

Growth in the Digital Special Effects and computer animation industry, a sub-segment of the media and entertainment industry, is exploding world wide. A number of reasons have caused this growth and they involve the merging of technology and imagination.This article illustrates the dynamics and business model and processes of the animation effects industry and introduce the existing infrastructure.

Agile development methodologies might be the new fad in software design, but how much emphasis is there on secure code? Australian .NET developer and consultant at Readify, Rocky Heckman, reveals some concerns of agile development methodologies.

Macromedia Monday announced Macromedia Studio 8, the new version of its suite for Web designers, video professionals and graphic artists to design, develop and maintain interactive online applications and content

Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. This means that OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision.

SkyOS Beta 8.5 has just been released. New features include the Indexing Service, an SQL based file attribute and content index service which makes it possible to find your files in a fraction of a second, better developer support, and a lot of bug fixes. NVU has also been ported and is available in this release. You can read the changelog here. Update: Screenshots gallery by OSDir.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2." A list of mirrors is available here.