Thom Holwerda Archive

The first release of BSD divert sockets for Linux 2.6 kernels has been completed and may be downloaded here.

Yesterday, the Open Sword Group released a beta of Pixen v3. "Pixen is the best program for the pixel artist using Mac OS X. Pixen is specifically for small-scale or pixel art; it shines better there than any other application. Not only that, but Pixen carries no price tag: it's open source under the MIT license and absolutely free." As far as I know, this is the only application of it's kind, with no equivelant on either Mac, Windows or Linux.

Readers of The Reg have found disturbing evidence that Apple's HQ in Cupertino might soon disappear from the face of the earth. They also found strong evidence that London will vanish too, while the Twin Towers are supposed to reappear shortly.

Microsoft's decision to call the next version of its OS Vista might have a raised a few smiles last week but one Redmond resident is less than impressed. The boss of Vista, a software and services company for small businesses is considering taking legal action against the software giant.

The Indigo and Avalon Beta1 "RC" enables developers to continue experimenting with early builds of these technologies, get acquainted with the development experience, and provide Microsoft with feedback.

Distrowatch reports that a new beta version of Mandriva Linux 2006 appeared on the mirrors over the weekend. Like the first one a week ago, the new beta release, labelled as 2006 0.1.1, has not yet been officially announced, but the good news is that the mirroring problems we mentioned in last week's DistroWatch Weekly have been solved and the new release is now available from the usual Mandriva mirror sites. OSDir has a handful of screenshots.

If you are not lucky enough to have access to a 64-bit computer, you might be wondering about some of the implications of having a 32-bit environment alongside the 64-bit one. Read on.

"Everyone of us always wanted to have the ability to compile for Windows and Unix in one makefile, right? Unfortunately, there is very few documentation on this topic and I had quite a hard time to get things working the way I wanted to. I wrote this small how-to to share the way I managed to build my toolchain with other people."

The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth. Elsewhere, here is a guide to PC-BSD.

Visopsys is an alternative OS for PC-compatibles. Version 0.56 is a maintenance and bugfix release, with important fixes to eliminate potential boot problems, faulty EXT2/3 mounts, and problems with the detection of secondary hard disks. Important multitasker improvements related to process initialization have also been back-ported from the 0.6 development branch. Download page and changelog.

Vulnerabilities in USB drivers for Windows could allow an attacker to take control of locked workstations using a specially programmed Universal Serial Bus device, according to an executive from SPI Dynamics, which discovered the security hole. However, SPI tested attacks on Windows systems, but any operating system that is USB-compliant is probably vulnerable.

20 years ago on July 23rd the Commodore Amiga was unveiled at the Lincoln Centre in New York. For the launch Commodore had hired Andy Warhol & Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie) to demonstrate the Amiga's graphics capabilities. Despite many dificulties the Amiga is still around today both as a company and as a community.

Mozilla 1.7.10 (release notes), a security update to the Mozilla Application Suite, is now available for download. There was no Mozilla 1.7.9 release: it was cancelled after it was discovered that changes in the equivalent 1.0.5 releases of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird caused some problems.

Setting up a wireless Internet Service provider (WISP) for your office or neighborhood doesn't have to be a taxing or expensive ordeal. If you build your network from easy-to-buy equipment and use Linux, you can use the power of shell scripts to make network management easy. This article gives you the tips and scripts you need.