Monthly Archive:: December 2001

The 'Tales of a BeOS Refugee' seems to have touched a nerve. In the two weeks since it was published at OSNews, I have received more than 500 email responses from users of Mac OS, BeOS, Linux, and Windows. Most of the responses were point-by-point rejoinders to facts and observations in the original piece, some of them highly detailed. Because it was impossible to respond to everyone individually, and because I thought many people would appreciate being able to read some of the comments and my reactions to them, I've assembled this addendum: Reactions to "Tales of a BeOS Refugee". The piece includes further clarifications and extrapolations on my ideas about the Creator code and application binding, plus dozens of miscellaneous notes and continued comparisons between BeOS and OS X. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to write. As always, comments are welcome, but no guarantees on responses.

A reader over at Slashdot noted that the folks making Debian GNU/Hurd have released a new snapshot in 4 CD images. This is up from three CDs in the G1 release we noted in October, although only the first CD is required to install a basic system.

LinuxBIOS is a project aimed at replacing the proprietary legacy BIOSes of x86 PC hardware with an open, free, fast, and customizable BIOS. Eric Biederman of Linux NetworX has written an excellent article explaining how the BIOS works, how the boot process on x86 differs from PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, and Itanium, and what people are using LinuxBIOS for.

"From our perspective, we believe VMware 3.0 is a big improvement from Version 2.0, which had some technical problems and limitations, a non-intuitive user interface, and required users to edit config files at times to gain added features (much like configuring Linux). It also presented misleading messages occasionally. Version 3.0 brings a big change to the UI, with a cleaner more intuitive look, and more descriptive messages. The help system has been expanded, with far fewer references to the Web (which was a real problem in Version 2)." This is the second part of the excellent two-part article on Virtual Machines and VMWare at ExtremeTech. Read the first part here.

"Opera bills itself as "the fastest browser on earth!" -- and indeed it is fast. But to laud it only for its speed would miss the point. Much more impressive are Opera's other features for surfing the World Wide Web. Consider the menu item for quickly deleting cookie files that Web sites leave behind to track you. Or the item for rejecting pop-up windows, such as those pitching wireless cameras from X10." Read the rest of the review at CNN.

"Microsoft Corp. watchers are dubbing 2002 "the year of .Net" as the software company prepares to release products that will build on its software-as-a-service vision. Releases slated for the new year include the Visual Studio .Net 2002 development suite, the Windows .Net Server family and the Tablet PC. The company's teams are also working on the next version of Office and the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, as well as Visual Studio .Net 2003." Read the rest of the article at ExtremeTech.

You may or may not have heard about Lindows already. Lindows (the company) is a new Linux start-up, launched earlier this year by former MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson. The promise of Lindows (the Operating System) is to be an affordable alternative (Operating System) to Microsoft Windows. And, as an extra boon, this alternative to Windows (which promises to run all your Windows applications), will run Linux applications as well.

ELX is a new Linux desktop distribution aimed to attract Windows users. (We previously mentioned it about three weeks ago.) ELX 1.0 Pre 1 is now available for download on two binary CD images via FTP or HTTP. There are also 20 screenshots to entice, mostly of configuration tools and apps under the default KDE desktop.

In the year 2000, some pundits suggested the growing enthusiasm about open source was destined to give out. Once economic conditions returned to pre-dot-com levels, they reasoned, open source would be seen as a fad, just like the pet rock. The editorial at InfoWorld concludes that "the hype surrounding open source did not survive the year. But open source itself not only survived, it began to thrive in the business world."

Ximian and Hewlett-Packard have announced that Ximian GNOME is now available for HP-UX as a first step towards GNOME becoming the default desktop on HP-UX replacing CDE. HP-UX is the second 'heavy' Unix which abandons CDE for Gnome after Sun Solaris 9.

There is a new version for the unstable build of mySQL 4.01, WindowMaker 0.80 (with some nice new features), GCC 3.03, while KDE released version 2.2.2 for FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

The FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center has urged users of Microsoft's WindowsXP operating system to disable a feature that could leave computers open to attacks from hackers. In a statement issued Saturday, the FBI's NIPC, which usually leaves computer security warnings to the private sector, said it held technical discussions with Microsoft and industry experts Friday to identify ways to minimize the risk from security holes in the XP software, which was launched in late October.

The SkyOS developers are working on brining lots of new features in the new version 3.6 as you can see here. A new screenshot can be seen here as well. MenuetOS is prepared to release version 0.63 which enables the MTRRs for the Intel LFBs resulting to a much faster GUI. Also, a newer version of FreeVMS was released recently.

At the time I was writing this article, the Linux kernel 2.4.17 was released only 3 days ago and these holly days you may find some more time to experiement with it. The following article includes step-by-step instructions on how to compile a Linux 2.4.X kernel, an article mostly targetting people who have never dared to compile their own kernel yet. Read on and we promise, it is not that hard to do so.