Monthly Archive:: April 2004

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 3.5. This is our 15th release on CD-ROM (and 16th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of eight years with only a single remote hole in the default install. As in our previous releases, 3.5 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system. Read the official release announcement and changelog.

Federico Mena-Quintero continues his coverage from XDevConf regarding X11 technologies.

"Look at the first desktop screenshot at left. It looks like a Mac OS X machine, right? Wrong. It's a Windows XP box made up to look like a Mac. Look closely, and you'll see that its creator has done a very good job; although the machine is running Windows XP, the interface is almost indistinguishable from an OS X machine. Notice the dock, desktop background, menus, system font and icons for applications and folders. Even the keyboard shortcuts belong to the Mac OS X." Read the rest of the article with screenshots at Wired.

Intel's forthcoming 915 (the Grantsdale) and 925 (the Alderwood) series of chipsets, expected to hit the market in June, will not bundle drivers for either Microsoft Windows 98 or Windows ME operating systems (OS), according to sources at Taiwanese motherboard makers. The new chipsets will only offer Microsoft support for the more up-to-date versions of the Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

You can easily surf the Web and run a spreadsheet on a Linux-powered PC, but good luck if you want to balance your checkbook. Linux has more fans all the time, but a lack of familiar applications is slowing adoption, says News.com. Major software makers say they're waiting for more Linux users before bothering to adapt their products to open-source--but Linux advocates say the window of opportunity is closing. Not even Linux guru Bruce Perens can find all the open-source software he needs: "I admit it--I still have a Windows machine that I use solely to run Quicken and TurboTax once a year."

Microsoft estimates spyware is responsible for half of all PC crashes and warns that it has become a multimillion-dollar support issue for computer makers, Internet service providers and technicians. Also, Brad Wardell of Stardock wrote an interesting article regarding spyware on common Windows applications here and News.com has an article about spyware and the FCC here.

In The SCO Group Inc.'s latest U.S. District Court filing as it battles IBM over Linux, the company is no longer using the affirmative defense that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is unconstitutional. SCO president and CEO Darl McBride took aim at the GNU General Public License, under which Linux is distributed, in a December open letter. He said the GPL violates the U.S. Constitution as well as U.S. copyright and patent laws.

This article describes how to find common programming mistakes that may lead to poor startup time and how to correct them. Included is a case study demonstrating how the Runtime Spy was used to improve the startup performance of IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer. The previous article, Part 1, introduces the Runtime Spy.

OpenBSD is a name synonymous with security, having earned the respect and adoration of security-concious sysadmins everywhere. OpenBSD is used in data centers all over the world, is the basis for several security products (from OpenBSD's site), and is even the basis for Microsoft's Services For Unix.

Coder "t3rmin4t0r" seems to have ported MyXAML to Linux. Here is a screenshot of the default WinForms powered MyXAML calculator demonstration, and here is the same demonstration running under DotGNU's work-in-progress Qt-powered WinForms backend.

Here's an interview with Stacey Quandt, a Linux and open source industry analyst. She explains why she feels Linux will overtake Windows as the number one server OS within the next three years.

Sun Microsystems has been marketing Solaris, one of the main Unix derivatives, for about twenty years. So why, then, would they market a Linux distribution? Let's take a look at what it is they're offering and what it's uses are to shed some light on the "why". Read the rest of the review at PCBurn.

In a local office somewhere near you, someone wants to send someone else a electronic document. Once there was a fairly broad agreement about the way such documents were prepared and delivered, before the advent of the computers and the Internet.

Here is an article asking Red Hat to opensource the GFS cluster file system. Elsewhere, Red Hat's newest version of Linux has been granted a significant security certification, bringing the company a step closer to competitors. Version 3 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been certified to meet Evaluation Assurance Level 2 (EAL2) of the Common Criteria certification.