Monthly Archive:: May 2004

Software developers will soon have their chance to smoke what Sun Microsystems is rolling. At the JavaOne conference next month, Sun will release a developer kit for its Project Looking Glass 3-D software. This will be the first time Sun has let anyone outside of the company fiddle with that code, and the move confirms that Project Looking Glass is heading toward a general release on Linux and Solaris.

The LinuxFormat printed magazing reviewed SuSE Linux 9.1 Pro and rated it 9/10 (PDF scan here).

Open Source database vendor MySQL AB released its latest incremental release last week (version 4.0.20), but according to some in the community, it still doesn't address what some say serious licensing concerns. Its license changed from LGPL to GPL (in order to not allow commercial/closed applications to link with its free version, but to instead push to them buy a license). Unfortunately, this license change comes to conflict with other OSS licenses, like PHP's (and maybe Perl's too).

What do people do these days when they are bored? One of the latest additions to the list of answers seems to be Build a Linux Distribution. Have you checked on Distrowatch lately? They have upwards of 100 distributions listed there. I used to be happy that I had a lot of choices but now I am beginning to get intimidated by the sheer volume of choices. You could play charades with only Linux Distro Names.

MandrakeSoft released the Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official version through BitTorrent.

Open Source Development Labs, which promotes adoption of Linux, said Monday it is putting in place a new system to better track and document changes to the operating system's kernel.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a few new developer tools but otherwise played a greatest-hits set before an audience of about 10,000 information technology professionals at the TechEd conference.

USB 2.0 support on OpenBSD is here, you can try out the latest snapshots for the new code.

ThinkSecret reports some new details about Apple reorganization in two divisions (Macintosh and iPod). Longtime hardware developer Steve Sakoman, a former Palm and Be executive, had rejoined Apple Computer as a vice president and now he will lead iPod software development. Mr Sakoman was involved in the Mac II development and was the main guy behind the creation of the Newton. At Be, he designed the first generation H0bbit-based BeBox (the one that had 5 AT&T chips), back in the early days of Be. He later left and when he came back became Be's CTO and then PalmSource's exec.

Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned.

The current version of MorphOS 1.5 has been presented at PUSH. From the slides of a presentation given at the show you can see these improvements. There is also a video (12 MB) available.

.NET provides a powerful set of classes for working with XML directly. This article provides an overview of the most important of these classes, and some examples of what you can do with them.

This is the Platform SDK for Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 1. Developers can use this to build and test pre-release applications for Windows XP Service pack 2.

Joe Beda writes that slides from the WinHEC sessions are posted up: Greg Schecter: Avalon Graphics Stack Overview , Joe Beda: Avalon Graphics - 2D, 3D, Imaging and Composition , Kerry Hammil: Graphics on the Windows Desktop , David Brown: Avalon Text . The slides were targeting hardware people. This was really about letting IHVs know what they can do to prepare for what is coming in Longhorn and Avalon.