Monthly Archive:: July 2003

After over a year of work, we're almost ready with DesktopX 2. We even have a public beta of it now here. Here is a Windows media video with DesktopX 2 in action. I've also written an article for the OSNews readers about DesktopX 2.

Scott McNealy, the chairman, president and CEO of systems vendor Sun Microsystems, has dramatically warned companies of the legal dangers of using open source software such as the Linux operating system. Following on from SCO Group's threats to sue Linux users over its intellectual property claims, McNealy told an audience of UK businesses that they should steer clear of open source software unless their suppliers can offer insurance against such legal action.

JNode is a java-based OS. Learn more about it and check out shots, here.

In this editorial, LinuxDevices.com founder Rick Lehrbaum offers his "reflections" on the recently published (Microsoft-funded) Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) report which claims embedded development projects based on Microsoft's "Windows Embedded" operating system platforms (specifically, Windows CE .NET and Windows XP Embedded) are completed 43% faster and at 68% lower cost, on average, compared with similar projects using Embedded Linux.

Choosing the benchmark tests for this year's Ultimate Linux Box becomes a project unto itself.

The Lycoris Development Team is hard at work finishing Desktop/LX Update 3. Release candidate 0 is now available and all users can use the Update Wizard to update their systems to build 119 or install anew. Desktop/LX now can read/write Windows shares. Download the 613 MB ISO from here.

Libranet is a bit different than the other GNU/Linux distributions we are considering this time around. In an era when distributions are often judged by the glitz that their installer and customized desktop provides, Libranet has neither glitz nor much of a customized desktop. Read more at OfB.biz.

Hay Young, a researcher at the Center for Media Arts at City University of Hong Kong, believes computing should be a full contact sport. Elsewhere, this article describes work being done at MIT on Multi-Domain Sketch Recognition software. The technology allows users to draw basic shapes, and then applies rules to determine what objects the shapes represent and how these objects should behave.

Here is a small benchmark test, testing various filesystems. Elsewhere, 10.3 Panther is tested on an iMac G3 600 Mhz and --except the reduced OpenGL performance (possibly because of changes in the QuartzExtreme that this iMac does not support with its ATi Rage Pro card)-- it is showing to be overall faster than 10.2 according to the XBench test suite. Update: More benchmarks. HP released new server speed-test results Wednesday that for the first time compare its version of Unix with Windows on the company's top-end Itanium server--and Unix came out ahead.

Aleksey Dolya interviews Brian Kernighan, one of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages and someone who has seen the birth of UNIX and C.

As new species of XML docs are emerging, vendors are unveiling increased RDBMS support for XML.

Proclamations of Linux's commercial success are frequently punctuated with statements about how some analyst firm has found that sales have grown faster than has any operating system since 1999, or that Linux server shipments make it the second most popular operating system for servers. Read the editorial at C|Net News by Ian Murdock, Debian founder.

miray Software released the latest version of its embedded and PC operating system µnOS. Besides a number of runtime enhancements of the system core the new version 0.98 contains a vastly improved window server, an all-new intelligent console interface and new system utilities. A dedicated internet platform for developers and interested users will be launched by miray in the near future.

Python 2.3 has just been released. Changes, Release Notes and Highlights for more info.