Monthly Archive:: February 2002

Travis Geiselbrecht, the developer of NewOS, writes in his web site: "Haven't updated this list in a while, but there's a lot of progress being made. Over the last couple of months we've implemented a rudimentary network stack, full dynamic lib support, and work has been started on a real native filesystem. Also a full-fledged IDE driver is in the work. Thanks to all the people that have helped me out." Download the latest version of this young operating system, in a source form here.

According to a heise article, free versions of Star Office will now only be available to Solaris users. Free versions for Linux and Windows users will no longer be offered. However, Mark McLoughlin of Sun mailed the gnome-hackers mailing-list announcing the deal between Sun, Ximian and Wipro. The deal means that Wipro will assign up to 50 people to work on GNOME including hackers, QA people, documenters and more.

MacSlash features an interesting interview with David Pogue, a Macintosh icon and author of "MacOSX: The Missing Manual" and "Piloting Palm, The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry" books. David talks all about MacOSX and what's still needed by the popular OS, he talks NeXT, UNIX and more.

When NeXT, Inc. sold its business to Apple, the NeXT/OpenSTEP operating systems went unsupported. New hardware emerged in the x86 market, and NeXT was not able to boot successfully anymore (among others, problems with the CD-rom drivers, while the last CPU it supported was the Pentium Pro). However, a few NeXT "die hards" have managed to boot OpenSTEP under VMWare, the x86 runtime application. You can find instructions here and here on how to run OpenSTEP under Linux and Windows' VMWare respectively (screenshots included). Moreover, Atomic Object, Inc. released a SVGA OpenSTEP display driver for VMWare (although the graphics VMWare specs are not publicly available), so now the OS is almost fully supported by VMWare, even so unofficially. On a related note, the GnuSTEP project moves in a faster pace lately, trying to implement the OpenSTEP and MacOSX's Cocoa APIs.

BeServed is a native network file system for BeOS. It allows you to share files between computers running BeOS. You can connect to (i.e., mount) folders from remote computers and access files just as if those files were local to your computer. Unlike NFS and CIFS, BeServed supports all the unique benefits of the Be File System (BFS), such as attributes, MIME-based typing, indexes, querying etc. (BFS features are only available on the BeOS platform; foreign versions of the file server do no yet support attributes, indexing, etc.) BeServed includes a network browsing application called 'My Network', which lists the available computers on your network in much the same way as Microsoft's Network Neighborhood. The company now ported their product to Solaris, following releases of Linux & Windows.

Amiga Inc has announced that it is working with Nokia to integrate AmigaDE technology into Nokia`s new Mediaterminal. The AmigaDE will offer users the ability to download and use AmigaDE applications, MP3, MPEG4, Universal Chat and streaming video, turning the family TV into a multifunctional infotainment center. AmigaDE technology will also be used in a whole scala of upcoming handheld devices and will become fully integrated in a future releases of the Amiga operating system. To get an idea of what future cellphones will look like, take a look these concept pictures of future Nokia phones. Also should be noted that PDA/cellphone targetted AmigaDE 3D games are under development. For instance an AmigaDE version of Hyperion Entertainment`s Warp3D technology was recently demonstrated to me at the Amiga 2001 fair in Cologne. Here`s a Status Report with screenshots of Payback for the AmigaDE, a GTA-clone and this year`s most popular classic 68k AmigaOS game title. If you want to speak to AmigaDE or AmigaOS designers and developers for yourself then be sure to attend the upcoming AmigaExpo show to be held in the US.

The IBM developerWorks article by David Faure discusses KParts, an architecture for graphical components, found in KDE, the KDE. KParts allows applications requiring the same functionality to share a component by embedding the graphical component into the application's window. The article also compares KParts with other component models, such as CORBA, and describes the main concepts used in KParts, including actions, plug-ins, part managers, and GUI merging.

"PC makers and several states allege that new Microsoft licensing agreements, arrived at under the proposed antitrust settlement between the software maker and the U.S. Justice Department, impose harsher terms on some manufacturers than agreements currently in place." The details make it sound more like this is a pricing structure change that lowers costs for low-volume OEMs, and raises them for high-volume OEMs. CNET has the story.

"Given the speed at which technology changes, the world is much different than it was even five years ago. Consider this, for example: By the end of the year, two platforms--J2EE and .Net--will essentially control the programming languages market. J2EE already commands large market share, while Microsoft has moved all of its languages over to .Net." Read the rest of the editorial at ZDNews.

"OpenGL and DirectX represent a schism in the graphics world, one that has hampered development at times, and fostered it at others. There are new developments coming, and the schism appears to be closing somewhat." Read the rest of the report at Tom's Hardware.

Walmart.com is planning to sell PCs without any pre-loaded OS, "to gauge the response among tech-oriented customers who may want to load their own operating systems." Read about it at CNET.

Steve was drawing things out, as he is wont to do. We'd seen demonstrations by Adobe, we got to see the iBook's new larger look, he'd prattled on and on about the virtues of iPhoto, we were getting restless. We wanted to see IT. Whatever Steve Jobs had up the sleeve of that black mock-neck we wanted to see it. In all fairness those of us that are rabid weblog addicts had already seen it. Slashdot had broken the news the night before when 'Time Canada' plastered it all over their website. It was the new iMac, and inside the 'reality distortion field' that Steve Jobs projects at every MacWorld keynote, it was insanely great.

"AMD made public some of its details regarding its 64-bit Hammer chipsets, now to be known as the 8000 series of products. The initial members of the 8000 series will feature an I/O hub, a graphics tunnel, and a PCI-X tunnel. The components will use the HyperTransport I/O protocol developed by AMD and are due in the fourth quarter of 2002, AMD said." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech.

"Microsoft, trying to protect its software empire from open-source rivals such as Linux, on Thursday said it is expanding a program to share the underlying code of its Windows operating system. Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, which it started last year to counter the image that it jealously guards its products, is being expanded to let systems integrators--companies that help other companies manage their computer systems--peek at the Windows blueprints." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.