Xandros believes in the latter and their polished look and graphic install make it all the easier for the new user to make the transition to Linux. Read the rest of the review here.
"I love working with many distributions and always have two or three installed on my computer. In the end, SUSE meets my needs as a developer, consultant, and home user better than any other single distribution. I can run my home PC and a multinational corporation with the same code -- that is bang for your buck."Read more here.
"The seemingly constant restructuring at Sun has made it difficult to find and retain consistent contacts in their licensing program. The latest blow to our efforts was the recent notification of Sun's desire to revoke and renegotiate the FreeBSD Foundation's SCSL license"says the FreeBSD Foundation. We hope that Sun will reconsider.
For some time now, Sun has been trying to push its way into non-proprietary Unix markets, and Solaris 10 is its crowning achievement. An abundance of innovative new features, mostly aimed at administrators rather than users, contributes further to Solaris 10's value proposition. An interesting balance of administrative features and support for new hardware implies Sun is trying hard to maintain its current niche, as well as move into server and workstation territories where Linux has encroached. Read more here.
Daniel is a software design engineer on the Avalon team and he's responsible for the 3D features of Avalon. Here he gives us a demo of Avalon 3D. Originally designed to only run on the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, Avalon is now supported on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. In fact, the demo here is done on XP.
While many programs can obtain acceptable performance by simply letting the processor manage its own caching, programs with special requirements may obtain dramatically improved performance by giving the processor explicit instructions and manipulating the cache directly. More typically, boot firmware may need to flush and enable the cache.
As stated on their website, "AROS is a portable and free desktop operating system aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1, while improving on it in many areas." ArosMax is a version of Aros that can be run from within a Windows environment for easy evaluation.
The Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP3 Redistributable includes everything you need to run .NET Compact Framework applications, including the Common Language Runtime and the .NET Compact Framework class library. Elsewhere, Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) is a security technology that helps protect Windows users from spyware and other potentially unwanted software.
With Gambas, you can quickly design your program GUI, access MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, pilot KDE applications with DCOP, translate your Basic program into many languages, create network applications easily, and so on...
Since installing x64 and VS.NET 2005 Dec04 CTP, I've ported a few apps to 64bit. Its usually pretty easy. The hardest part I had was caused by a UNICODE define.
Kommander is a powerful but easy to learn development environment. "Graphical Scripting with Kommander" takes us through the creation of a graphical interface for Konstruct, a tool for downloading, configuring and installing KDE from source packages. The article also lists some of the exciting developments coming to Kommander in the near future.
Red Hat developer Christopher Blizzard, who maintains the Mozilla packages, has a rather extensive blog on the plans for Open Sourcing Netscape servers that Red Hat recently brought out from AOL. Another interesting Blog is on Evince, a new document viewer to replace GPDF and Gnome Ghostview by Redhat developer Bryan Clark.
Opera Software today released the much awaited beta version of its next browser for the Linux platform. The new version includes Fit-to-Window-Width, Fit-to-Paper-Width, improved RSS handling, Start Bar for easy access to main features, and automatic update checks, all presented in a simplified user interface.
Jason Walsh, in an editorial for The Guardian, wonders if the kind of fawning devotion that Mac users have for their computers could persist if the Mac were to achieve more widespread use. For example, fans of the ill-fated Cube and Newton are fanatical, but is it really cool to love an iPod, now that everybody has one? It's a timely question, with the spectre of a low cost mac on the horizon.
Microsoft Corp. has pulled the plug on a version of Windows XP for Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 processor. The move marks the end for Itanium 2 in Windows-based workstations and comes after major hardware vendors abandoned the 64-bit chip for use in workstations.
NewsForge has published an interview with several prominent NetBSD developers:
"NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports 52 system architectures . . . To celebrate the release, we've asked several well-known NetBSD developers to comment on some of NetBSD 2.0's new features." Read the interview here.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has been migrating its servers from Solaris to Linux over a period of time with about 30% completed now "When the Merc began considering its Linux deployment more than a year ago, Sun knew it wasn't in a strong position to compete. 'We didn't have a good answer for them,' acknowledges Glenn Weinberg, vice president of the operating platforms group at Sun."
