Monthly Archive:: January 2004

Red Hat will give eCos Copyrights to the FSF

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-13 Red Hat 4 Comments

Red Hat today announced that it would assign all of its copyrights in the eCos open source operating system to the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The contribution will enable the Free Software Foundation to act as the sole copyright steward of the project and work directly with the eCos community and its maintainers on future development.

SciTech Software Announces Release of Open Watcom 1.2

Submitted by AndrewB 2004-01-13 General Development 30 Comments

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that Open Watcom 1.2 has been released and is now available for download from its website. This release contains a large number of new features, product enhancements and several fixes designed to bring Open Watcom to a higher level of quality and compatibility. SciTech, the official maintainers of the Open Watcom project, have also announced the availability of an updated Open Watcom CD, complete with SciTech’s installer for DOS, OS/2, and windows. Support for the update will be handled exclusively through the Open Watcom website.

Court: No Microsoft claims via Lindows site

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-13 Linspire 14 Comments

A judge has ruled that the Web site Linux vendor Lindows set to aid California residents in processing claims against rival software maker Microsoft will not be tolerated.

Frenzy: LiveCD FreeBSD Portable System Administrator Toolkit

Submitted by Alexandr Kovalenko 2004-01-13 FreeBSD 8 Comments

Frenzy is a "portable system administrator toolkit", LiveCD based on FreeBSD. It generally contains software for hardware tests, file system check, security check and network setup and analysis. The system is oriented to Russian-speaking users, but this could change if project will get more popularity.

YellowTAB Zeta 1.0-RC2 Release Imminent

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-13 Zeta 105 Comments

YellowTAB informed us that their testing of Release Candidate 2 of Zeta 1.0 has finished. They sent us two screenshots of Zeta 1.0-RC2 and Bernd Korz replies to two of our questions regarding the RC-2.

Sun Java Desktop System Live CDs Coming Soon?

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-13 Oracle and SUN 20 Comments

Sun's Glynn Foster is reporting from the Linux conference in Australia that he was able to get some JDS Live CDs to give away. It might be safe to assume that Sun will be releasing these for free to the public for them to taste JDS first hand.

The MandrakeMove Experience

Guest post by Alex 2004-01-13 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 31 Comments

MandrakeMove is a Live CD distribution, or in other words, it does not need to be installed. It is an interesting concept, but not a new one, there are quite a few similar products, such as the famous Knoppix, SUSE Live, LindowsCD, Mempis, PCLinuxOS, Gnoppix and a few others.

Novell offers legal protection for Linux

Submitted by Ressev 2004-01-13 Novell and Ximian 14 Comments

Novell expects this week to begin offering SuSE Linux customers some legal protection for using the open-source operating system, the fourth legal umbrella to emerge from a computing industry grappling with legal threats brought by SCO Group.

MySQL Upgrades with Enterprise Features

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-13 Databases 13 Comments

It's not quite an Oracle or IBM database yet, but open source MySQL is catching up to the giants in terms of enterprise features. Version 5.0 was released Monday by developers MySQL AB of Sweden and includes for the first time stored procedures that simplify the development of enterprise applications.

Editorial: Can Linux Make It Mainstream?

Guest post by David Howe 2004-01-12 Linux 139 Comments

This is a commentary. From a Linux user who does tech support for Windows users and works in the real world of a corporate Windows network environment. 2004 has been touted by many as the year of the Linux desktop. Indeed with the backing of IBM, Sun and now Novell, the business world looks like getting a serious Linux desktop contender. But has Linux on the desktop really got what it takes?

FreeBSD 5.2 Released

Guest post by Matthew Baulch 2004-01-12 FreeBSD 53 Comments

FreeBSD 5.2, the latest in the 5.x development series has been released and is now available from the master server and should appear at mirrors shortly. New features include ACPI 2.0, a much refined ATAng, a new swap pager providing improved throughput and many other changes. For the UI-inclined users, GNOME has been updated to version 2.4.1 and KDE to 3.1.4.

Bochs 2.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-12 OS News 22 Comments

After a whole year, here is a new version for Bochs, v2.1. It sports a new disassembler, 3DNow!/SSE/SSE2/PNI instruction support, Vmware3/Sparse/Undoable/Growing harddisk images support, many VGA emulation improvements (e.g. high/true color VBE modes added), no more X11 vga font required etc. I tried Bochs 2.1 last night on my Mac OS X Panther but it couldn't read any of my VMWare 3.x images (I tried Syllable and Plan9) saying something to the effect of "VMWare COW Disk images are invalid" and while the ata0 mode was set correctly to "vmware3" in the .bochsrc file.

Reviews of Mac OS X Panther by Bruce Tognazzini

Submitted by David Lazaro Saz 2004-01-12 macOS 68 Comments

Bruce Tognazzini has posted three new articles reviewing the usability of Mac OS X Panther 10.3, how to get more from Panther and why the dock still... sucks. "Panther: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", "Make Your Mac a Monster Machine" and "Top (Ten) Nine Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks".

Windows 98 Gets Support Reprieve

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-12 Windows 23 Comments

Although support for the older operating systems was due to end shortly, Microsoft has announced that it will be extended Microsoft has extended support for Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows ME. The software giant has extended support for the operating systems until 30 June, 2006. During that time paid over-the-phone support will be available, and "critical" security issues will be reviewed and "appropriate steps" taken.

Novell: SuSE Stays the Same, for Now

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-12 Novell and Ximian 10 Comments

Networking software giant Novell Inc does not have any plans to change anything in the Linux operating system from its recently-acquired SuSE AG ... at least, not in the medium term. "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own," said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region.

Microsoft To Launch Windows Services For Unix 3.5 Next Week

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-12 Unix 34 Comments

Windows Services for Unix 3.5, which is currently in beta testing and will be officially launched next week at the LinuxWorld Expo, is updated for the latest round of Windows offerings, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

Simulate Dual Monitors without Dual Head

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-12 Hardware 53 Comments

Bartels Media announced the release of the Windows software MaxiVista which simulates a multi-monitor setup with the use of two PCs in the case the user doesn't have a dual-head graphics card. MaxiVista allows using any secondary PC as an additional display of a primary PC.

Unununium OS now has libc

Submitted by Charles Goodwin 2004-01-12 OS News 18 Comments

Progress looks to have been picking up for the Unununium OS, where dietlibc has been ported and much work has continued in all areas including the file system, thread engine, memory manager, graphic device support, network stack as well as the build and documentation system. A new release is 'imminent'.

Adopt a Lost Technology Today

Submitted by Simon Strandgaard 2004-01-12 OS News 44 Comments

When new operating systems gets designed today, great systems such as Amiga, Atari and VMS, seems to get overlooked in regard to their original features not found on other OSes. It might be time to collect and categorize those special unique features under the great/lost ideas wiki, so new OSes don't have to re-invent the wheel and re-innovate.

Microsoft Expands Opteron Windows Test

Eugenia Loli 2004-01-11 Windows 18 Comments

Microsoft is offering an open beta version of its Windows Server 2003 for systems using the Advanced Micro Devices 64-bit Opteron processor. The beta version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems has been available to a small group of testers in a "technical beta" since October. With this release, the software is available to anyone interested in trying it out through a customer preview program, says John Borozan, a Microsoft product manager.