Monthly Archive:: January 2004

During an inteview with NewsForge at LinuxWorld, MandrakeSoft CEO Francois Bancilhon said the company is releasing financial results today that show a profit. "Now, he said, "we can move to the next step, which is to grow it." In the meantime, Mandrake Linux 10-beta1 was released today.

Here's a review of the new FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. A few new improvements were made to the kernel and several to the userland, and of course there was a bug or two. If you're looking for an AMD64 operating system, FreeBSD 5.2 might be for you.

This is the second part of Pudge's review of Mac OS X Server 10.3 on Slashdot.

Lately, a lot of activity is going on in Linux circles. Novell has become a leading Linux distro vendor, Redhat has raised $600 million in a bond offering, and SCO is making news every day. The article "IBM's Linux Consolidation Plan" is Latif's analysis of the consolidation going on behind the scenes.

"It's all well and good to call Linux mature, but one of the most painful phrases in the IT industry proves it's not. That phrase is "end-to-end," and among the major hardware players out there, it's a surprisingly taboo concept. That is, surprisingly enough, except for one vendor - Solaris worshipper Sun" says TheRegister, while Computer Associates say that "First we had the PC generation. Then the Internet generation. And now we're in the midst of the Linux generation. And it's not too soon to join."

Intel has confirmed that its 'Prescott' processor features a longer instruction pipeline than the current desktop Pentium 4. The announcement lends weight to media claims that the chip will run more slowly than its predecessor. In the meantime, you can see why Apple waited for the 90nm version of the PowerPC 970 before launching a G5-based Xserve 1U rackmount server: the latter's heat dissipation characteristics.

Today we host a long and interesting interview with President & COO of Lindows.com, Kevin Carmony. We discuss about the desktop, the OSS community, Microsoft, LindowsOS 5 and much more. More over, just for the next couple of days, Lindows.com offers the LindowsOS Developer Edition 4.5 for free to the OSNews readers! Read more for details on how to use the OSNews text coupon and download this digital version of LindowsOS free of charge.

Recently hired by Ximian (now a subsidiary of Novell) in order to further improve the Linux kernel, Robert Love has interesting tasks ahead of him—integration of all this low level work into the Linux desktop, specifically the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform. The work is already coming to fruition as developer releases of "Project Utopia" (as it's been dubbed) have already been released. So sit back and let's see how Robert Love plans to make the Linux Desktop "Just Work".

If all goes well, this summer I'll be building a new house. I've owned a few houses before, some of them built in the 1920s and 30s, and full of all the charm and quirks of an old house, and a couple that were pretty new, with the lack of craftsmanship and imagination that's typical in most new construction in the USA today. But this time I'm building a custom home, just to my specifications, so I can have whatever features I want, limited only by my imagination (and budget). I'd like to integrate some home automation features into the house, and include wiring for future expansion.

Slashdot's Pudge reviews the Server version of Mac OS X Panther 10.3. Second part tomorrow.

The SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 has recieved EAL3 Certification. This is a step up from their previous accomplishment of EAL2, which they received (in association with IBM) with their product.

As many of you may remember I did a review of Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 (SFU) a few months ago. I remember being frustrated with that release because it seemed to me that all Microsoft did was throw something together just to be able to say "Hey look, we have this". I thought, since Microsoft released version 3.5, I would revisit and see what changes were done with it. I downloaded the beta version a while back and from the beta I was very impressed with the improvements that Microsoft made. Being a beta version it was buggy and some things just didnt quite work. I finally got the final version of the OpenBSD-based SFU 3.5 and this release makes dynamic leaps and bounds over previous releases of this software package. I am glad to see a lot more work was put into this release.

When Stuart Cohen signed on as chief executive of Open Source Development Labs in April, he didn't think so much of his time would be occupied with the actions of a small Utah-based company called the SCO Group. Read his interview at News.com.

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo began this morning at the Javits Center in New York City with a keynote address by Jack Messman, chairman of the board and CEO of Novell. Novell, Messman noted, is a billion-dollar company that's wagering its future on open source, with the acquisitions in the past year of Ximian and SuSE. Linux convert Novell proclaimed its strong support for open-source programming Wednesday, but made the case for a pragmatic approach that blends in its own proprietary applications.