Thom Holwerda Archive

Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu will remain fully supported for an extended period of time.

Sources close to Mandriva, Progeny and Turbolinux say the trio of companies will be announcing a new enterprise Linux distribution based on Debian Linux at the LinuxWorld event in San Francisco in August.

More and more projects use the browser as a primary means of communicating with the program. The main drawback of this approach is that it requires the user to configure and maintain his own Web server, or else requires the program to come bundled with a Web server. Jetty is simple for both programmers and users, making it a good choice for bundled web server.

SuSE 9.3 is the most polished and easy to use release from SuSE. It goes a long way in dispelling the notion that Linux is not ready for the desktop. It is a comprehensive release with enhanced hardware detection and configuration and an exhaustive suite of available applications.

IBM has today presented various new versions of their G5 processor at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan. Firstly, it introduced the much-anticipated PowerPC 970MP, the dual-core version of the G5. In addition, they also announced 3 low-power G5s, ranging from 1.2Ghz at 13W to 1.6Ghz at 16W. These processors will most likely find their way into Apple's Macs.

Can a Windows system and a Linux system talk together harmoniously? After all, there is a lot of work and personal data left on Windows PCs that many want to keep! So this question of networking the two systems is both reasonable and vital.

The second point release of the stable 2.10.x branch of GNOME is now officially released. This release has seen continued work to eliminate memory leaks, plain bugs and in general improve and polish the stable series of GNOME. Source: bindings, desktop, platform.

This is the first of two articles in which we describe how to acquire and build the source code for OpenSolaris. The first article provides all the necessary background information (terminology, where to get the tools, and so on) and describes a basic compilation and installation, and the second article will describe a more complicated compilation and installation.

Hardware accelerated 3D graphics on RISC OS took a step closer to reality, thanks to Simon Wilson. He claims to have ported Mesa 3.2, a 3D graphics library that sports an OpenGL software interface. More importantly, he says he has also ported an Nvidia graphics accelerator from BeOS to harness the GeForce2 video card in the Iyonix to plot graphics fast in hardware.

Windows Server System brings together several existing products and comes with three copies of the Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, a copy of Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition and a copy of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition. Elsewhere, MS released a fix to a major IE hole confirmed last week, while some eyebrows are raised as MS downgrades its Claria detections.

One of the things lacking on Linux is breadth of native commercial games. That's where emulating (or re-implementing) the host enviroment that the game was created for with Cedega (or WINE) comes in.

Two interesting articles on OS X today. This one summarizes some of the less-obvious new features of Apple's Tiger. The other one theorizes that Apple's shift to Intel is an incentive for Windows developers to port their software due to the lack of the endian problem.

Today the latest SVN checkout of Haiku sources gave us very good news: app_server can now run Tracker (screenshot 1 2 3), although it crashes so often that it is actually unusable. You can check this yourself by downloading a Haiku image from Philipp Schmid's blog and running it in Virtual PC (or VMWare). This news is a sign that Haiku is near alpha release.

After a decade of admiring Linux from afar, Claus Futtrup finally takes the plunge, choosing to dual-boot his Windows 98 system with Minislack. In this interesting guest column at DesktopLinux.com, Futtrup explains why he selected Minislack, and relates his experiences with installing, configuring, and using it as a newcomer to Linux.