Monthly Archive:: April 2003

"Is Server 2003 fast? Yes, it's easily outdistances anything that Microsoft has ever shown us before. And, yes, it's faster than Linux. It is stable? Based on about two weeks of testing with the final release, I would say that it's also the most stable Microsoft operating system I've ever seen. But then again, I'm not asking it to do much besides basic file/print. The functionality servers that any business needs are largely not there. Ironically, this reminds me of the old claim against Linux that it didn't have any applications. That was never true of Linux, but it is true of Server 2003." Read the article at Practical-Tech by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Unlike most areas of the technology business, 64-bit computing has somehow remained immune to the forces of commodity competition. Read the article at News.com by SuSE's CEO.

This time around, Transgaming WineX 3.0 has some new tools as well as improvements in the number of games supported and gaming speeds. In this article, LinuxOrbit is going to take a look at the new features of WineX 3.0, with a focus on their new GUI installer called Point2Play.

TriangleOS 0.0.3-RELEASE and a floppy image is now available for download, along with a readme and changelog. There are some new screenshots. Since the previous release last year most of the kernel code has been rewritten, network support has been added, updated the GUI and added more applications, like an editor and webserver.

Will systems is the future come with bios enabled browsers or embedded browsers without an OS? At Convea they have been working on creating an web-based office suite which would complement such a device perfectly (this effort is not unique on the web though).

Sun Microsystems released the Solaris 9 4/03 Operating System for the SPARC and x86 platforms. The third update to the Solaris 9 Operating System, Solaris 9 4/03 offers enhanced data storage scalability, allowing Solaris sites to use larger storage systems than ever before via the Solaris Volume Manager. Read more for additional features.

Compelled by the endless debate of whether Linux is ready for the desktop, I wrote my own rant. It morphed into some kind of "my experience with Linux". This is some kind of long term review of Linux, from the very specific viewpoint of someone who uses it to do research about computers and networks. It is not a distro comparison, or Linux vs Windows TCO comparison, or any such thing. It is just a story about a guy who found Linux.

"I've always been fascinated by the idea of running an operating system under another operating system. It's a cool hack to make a piece of hardware do double (or triple, or quadruple...) duty by running virtual machines. I've been hearing such good things about User-mode Linux (UML) that I had to give it a whirl." Read the article at UnixReview.

Lately, we've all read a lot of articles about desktop Linux - so many that it's getting hard to tell them apart. One says "Why Linux Sucks," the next "My Success With Linux." Even Michael Robertson of Lindows.com joined the fun with his "Why Desktop Linux Sucks, Today." But very few people have proposed anything radical, and I believe that's what's needed to take GNU/Linux to the next level.

With the announcement last week that Novell Inc. has tapped Linux as the migration path for NetWare, users said they finally have reason to believe that the folks in Novell's executive suite are as savvy as its engineers. NetWare 7 will put services on both OS kernels as means of providing migration option.

Though Oracle and IBM deny that MySQL, PostgreSQL or other open-source offerings are a threat to their enterprise business, they are still taking steps to re-emphasize their low-end offerings. Read the article at NewsFactor.

"As the development of Windows 2000 wound down over three years ago, Microsoft was making a transition of another kind: The company's development focus was moving from delivering technology to delivering solutions that met real customer needs. It sounds like an obvious strategy, but consider the ramifications: In the past, Microsoft would determine what features to include in each revision of its products, deliver as many of those features as it could in the time allotted, and then move any dropped features into the next version." Read the article at WinSuperSite.

Microsoft is considering an open source approach to one of its software libraries, following heavy pressure from developers and sharp competition in the growing mobile device development arena. The decision would be a radical one for Microsoft, a fierce opponent of the open source model of making intellectual property available for modification and redistribution. The surprise move to open source is being considered for the Windows Template Library (WTL) - an enhancement of the C++ language.

"SuSE Linux has readied a set of high-end features that do for its Linux enterprise operating system what spinach does for Popeye. The features beef up SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 to enable it to run applications that require very high levels of reliability, availability, performance and security, such as the applications that telecommunications carriers use to provide their services. This is why the set of features is called SuSE Linux Carrier-Grade Linux (CGL)." Read the article at InfoWorld.