Monthly Archive:: August 2003

Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox believes that Microsoft's upcoming major OS release will not be generally available until 2006, a year later than what Microsoft is currently predicting. He believes that the changes planned are too far-sweeping to be rolled out quickly, when you take into account that developers need time to prepare their software.

The GEOS operating system for the Apple II computer, once very much ahead of its time, has been officially re-released by its current owner, Breadbox Computer, LLC. You can now download it for free. I know it could already be downloaded from several dark corners of the Internet but I thought it might still be worth a note.

The DotGNU project is holding an international competition in the area of collaboratively implementing the System.Windows.Forms namespace in the C# class libraries, a GUI framework that will allow developers and end users to run and develop applications on many different platforms, anything from GNU/Linux, MS Windows, OS X to even handhelds. Participants will have a chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500. The full anouncement is here.

According to MacNN, sources are reporting that the latest developer release of Mac OS X "Panther" has changed its default shell from tcsh to bash. From ISPs using both OSX and Linux, it's kind of good news. It seem that Linux's popularity gives some kind of "prefered shell" status to bash.

The dot is running a piece on a recent presentation given by Matthias Ettrich, director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of KDE, in the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. He details what will be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next major version of KDE after 3.2. New features will include much faster startup speed and memory usage as well as a general cleanup of Qt's architecture, including the splitting of GUI and non-GUI related classes in Qt.

Interview by David Ford with Jonathan Walther, on fantasy, literature, life and primarily Xouvert the branch of Xfree86, which he is leading.

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Hours ago Marcello Tosatti released Linux 2.4.22. This release marks the next version in the 2.4.x stable series of the kernel. A host of changes have been made to wireless networking, adaptec drivers and the ia64 port in addition to many other bugfixes. You can get this new release as a patch from here or as a complete package from here. Changelog here.

Soeren Schmidt announced this weekend that ATAng has been merged into the FreeBSD -current kernel tree. Described by the author as "rather radical changes to the ATA driver", ATAng offers a number of impovements over the old ATA driver. This includes removal of the 'GIANT' lock, an improved framework that supports newer ATA controllers, merging of ATA and ATAPI code, and the removal of numerous bugs.

After months of speculation, Microsoft plans to give developers their first hard look at the next version of Windows in October.The Redmond, Wash., company expects to release a "developers preview" of the new operating system, code-named Longhorn, at its professional developers conference in Los Angeles. Although it won't be a full beta, or test, version, Microsoft executives have promised it will be more than just "slideware," software that companies haven't been using and don't know when it will be coming.

Advanced skinning, individualized desktops, animated icons, shiny colors and flashy windows: which alternative shell (for Windows) is the best?

Arno Klenke has recently checked in the media framework to Syllable CVS. Functionality of this initial checkin is impressive, with video and audio playback in many common formats via the FFMpeg codec plugin, the ability to play multiple audio streams with stream mixing and video playback with video overlays or playback with a bitmap display on systems which do not support overlays. You can check out some screenshots of the Media Player and ColdFish in action.

The Lycoris Development Team is hard at work finishing Desktop/LX Update 3, and release candidate 1 is now available. All users can use the Update Wizard to update their systems to build 127, available from the mirrors. It includes many more bugfixes and user improvements. Update 3 is slated for an early September release.

The official project for the replacement of the SkyOS GUI, the SkyOS GUI Design Contest, is now underway. You may view the current submissions at the website here. If you would like to contribute a design, please read the instructions on the first page of the site. Submissions will be accepted until September 8th. At that point, the designs will judged in an open community vote. The top 3 designs will move on, and will be judged by the designers, the community, and Robert (creator of SkyOS). The new GUI will appear in SkyOS v5.0. Update: The site's earlier bandwidth problems have been solved.