Monthly Archive:: February 2004

"Gunningham's departure dredges up lingering questions. Can Apple ever escape its desktop perch and march into the data centers of America Inc.? And what does Apple have to show for the past two years of efforts to sell powerful servers to businesses?" Alex Salkever is wondering for eCommerceTimes.

The XFree86 Project released XFree86 4.4.0 for seventeen platforms. Release notes here.

At The People Behind KDE this week and interview with the man who represents what working and contributing to a project like KDE stands for. He's from Cowtown, in The Great White North, Canada's own Aaron Seigo.

Yet another interesting project comes from Mozilla: MiniMo is a mini-Mozilla browser for PDAs and embedded systems. It requires anything between 32MB and 64MB of RAM and it currently runs on ARM CPUs using GTK+ (screenshots). Having just uploaded our latest OSNews web site for mobile devices, we hope that the MiniMo developer team have added a special/unique word in its user agent, so we can add it in the list of browsers that render our mobile version of our site instead of the desktop version.

JNode just released a new version, 1.6. Some of the new features are listed below:

The KDE project started an effort to redesign its Kcontrol panel and here is the outcome so far (in CVS). Update: A developer's article, how to build a KDE plugin structure.

Here is an article that describes a user's experience with Solaris' new feature called "Zones".

The second generation of OSNews' mobile web site is now up and running. The new version has an even simpler design than before which makes it much easier to render on under-featured HTML browsers, usually found on phones, PDAs or other embedded devices. The new design does not display any ads or a sidebar, but goes directly to the "meat" of the information. Read more for info & screenshots.

The recent released new version of Nmap (a security scanner) refuses, despite the usage of GPL, any usage by SCO. This is valid for all nmap versions: "we hereby terminate SCO's rights to redistribute any versions of Nmap in any of their products".

"Windowing environments are in their third decade, and they still do little more than open and close. There's no reason windows can't be more sophisticated", Daryl Blakeslee writes on NewsForge.

People who use Microsoft's Windows XP operating system aren't taking advantage of many of the systems best features, a top executive said - and the world's largest software maker has only itself to blame. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for software platforms, including Windows, said he thinks customers aren't using gadgets like Windows Messenger and Movie Maker because Microsoft hasn't done a good enough job telling people about them.

Red Hat has maintained the pure open-source approach, making open-source software available to users, says Gartner analyst George Weiss. "For the end-user, the software may be open source, but the question is, 'How much do I have to pay to enable the software with a subscription?'"

This article describes how Linux boots. Who loads what, who starts which program, and what services do and act like.

While sizing the heap for 32-bit Java applications on AIX, you can sometimes run into situations where a segment is claimed by two or more parts of the process simultaneously. This article shows how to detect this situation by using a well-established set of applications as examples, and we also show the reasoning behind the configuration changes suggested to avoid this situation.