Monthly Archive:: March 2005

Mandrakesoft's MCS 3.0 ships with a typical range of open-source server software and a set of configuration tools that we found unusually approachable. However, MCS 3.0 faces stiff competition not only from its most direct rivals—RHEL and SLES—but also from less costly alternatives such as Debian and slicker-looking options such as Mac OS X Server. As such, MCS 3.0 will fit best at sites with a pre-existing Mandrake presence, sats eWeek.

Microsoft will rename a product it was ordered by the European Commission to offer--a version of Windows with its media player removed.

Sun today announced that it has distributed more than one million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 OS since Jan. 31, when the software became available on Sun's Web site. Sun also announced that the Solaris 10 OS has set fourteen world-record benchmarks in this same timeframe and demonstrated application performance improvements greater than 50 times that of previous versions of Solaris.

The folks at Haiku have put out another newsletter, with two more articles from the series on coding Replicants, and another editorial from the quotable MJP.

HASE is investigating parts of the usability of GNOME. You can participate on the survey here.

Gentoo Linux is proud to bring you the long awaited Gentoo Linux 2005.0 release.

With Autopackage officially declared stable, there is now an easy way for developers to create up to date, easy installable packages. Expect an Autopackage article later this week at OSNews.

From Expert-Zone: "SkyOS Beta 8.4 has been released to the beta team today. Important changes inlcude GI3D, screensaver support, drastically improved Ati Radeon performance, improved networking, a (hopefully) fixed RealTek driver, and much, much more. Beta team members will know where to go."

There's an interview up with the creator of mach_inject, the OSS libraries that lets many apps override functions in any running process to change its behavior. It is very long, and touches on everything from compilers on the PowerPC to Apple's difficulties in breaking into the business market and why WebObjects is dying.

Michael Lotz has updated his Haiku blog with his latest progress. He got a Bash terminal to run, and he has the proof to show it. Read more.

After long consideration, Pat Volkerding has removed GNOME from Slackware. Pat mentions in the -current ChangeLog that GNOME takes a lot of time to package and this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of Slackware.

The IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just got a fresh dose of steroids. Its number-crunching speed has been pumped up to a phenomenal 183.5 trillion calculations every second. That's 183.5 teraflops in geek-speak -- double the 92 teraflops world record that BlueGene set just six months ago.

From a very personal and revealing interview with ex-Sun executive Danese Cooper: "The prevailing open source wisdom is that Linux is going to win, and anything you do that doesn't directly influence Linux in a positive way is not a good thing. We spoke to Linus Torvalds about this once, the OpenSolaris team, and he expressed interest in the project as a way for him to be able to get the Open Source community around Linux to move to a higher level, you know, to match some of the advantages that are in Solaris. We were talking about a virtuous cycle where Solaris gets better because of the places where Linux is better than Solaris now. Like especially for one and two processor performance, and Linux gets better because of the places where Solaris does better now. The beneficiary is the consumer."

A German RISC OS dealer managed to get some local TV coverage. It's not often you'll see mainstream TV coverage of any alternative operating system.