Thom Holwerda Archive

Sun Microsystems this week matured a bit as an x86 server vendor by kicking off a broad partnership with VMware that will see the companies team on engineering and sales efforts. Of most immediate help to customers is the support of VMware's highest-end partitioning product - ESX Server - with Sun's line of Opteron-based hardware.

Do you think the pixel is the only unit of measurement for building graphical displays? Come on, you can measure better than that! This article offers tips for user-friendly HTML layout and interface design, and explains why pixels aren't always the best unit for the job.

GNOME 2.12 Beta 2 has been released. Download: platform, desktop and bindings.

KDE 3.5 Alpha source tarballs are up on the FTP servers. This release is "really alpha quality", so no big announcement is planned. To get this release, you can either use Konstruct, or download the Klax KDE 3.5 Alpha Live-CD. Update: Here's a screenshot gallery of this release.

Microsoft unveiled details of its Strider HoneyMonkey research, a project that sniffs out sites hosting malicious code, and hands the information to other parts of the company for patching or legal action. The technical report (pdf) outlines the concept of cruising the Web with multiple automated Windows XP clients - some unpatched, some partially patched, some patched completely - to hunt for Web sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities.

Opera released a mini/lite version of their 8.0.1 browser for all Java-enabled phones. On a similar note, the current leader of mobile phone browsers with 52% of market share, Openwave Systems, shipped one billion handsets with their browser in it.

Scyld Software today announced an agreement with Cluster Resources, an innovator in advanced workload and resource management software. The two companies have joined forces to extend the virtualization and system management capabilities of Scyld Beowulf Linux clustering software to include a powerful workload management toolset.

The first draft of the next version of the General Public License should be released for public comments in early 2006, according to a key player in the effort to modernize the foundation of the free and open-source programming movements.

The August edition of the VOICE newsletter is out. VOICE is a newsletter for the OS/2 community. The August edition includes articles on of course IBM quitting support for OS/2, OS/2 in the living room, image acquisition and much more.

Despite their best attempts, Linux software companies say they are still having a hard time luring average consumers away from the Windows environment--but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Novell's vice president: "(Linux on the desktop) is not the sexy story that it used to be. However, there are some very steady and irreversible trends."

The Mac mini offers a viable platform for embedded multimedia development. In this article, Lewin Edwards shows how to make efficient, direct use of the framebuffer to display JPEG files and discusses the issues involved in deciding between direct framebuffer access and using the X server as a graphics driver. Part I of this series can be found here.

When you install a new Linux server distribution, you can often install all of the daemons you'll need to run on that machine at install time. Distribution vendors present a "ready to go" distribution by supplying initialization scripts for all of the services you might run. But what happens if you're building from source, and no init script is supplied? What if you're writing the source and haven't ever built an init script? Here are a few ways to cope when you're faced with this challenge.

Project Evil provides a set of basic functions commonly used by Windows network drivers. These functions are then translated internally to the FreeBSD driver model. To the driver, it appears that it is running in a normal Windows environment. To the OS, it appears that a native FreeBSD kernel module containing the driver is present. This article explains how it works.

Microsoft has released six patches for its Windows operating system today. Three of them are rated critical, one important and two moderate. The three critical ones are related Internet Explorer, Print Spooler and PnP. They all three fix issues where your machine could be taken over completely.