Monthly Archive:: July 2005

Opera Software today released the second upgrade to Opera 8. The new version, Opera 8.02, is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and includes security upgrades and smaller bug fixes. Download & changelog.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is in the works and is supposed to be released before Windows Vista. The following site has an ongoing updated list of fixes and downloads going into SP3.

Every year most Linux hackers attend a conference where they talk about all those topics only kernel hackers talk about. Papers of all the talks are now available, with a wide range of topics: NTPL, XEN, page cache performance, I/O scheduling, future ext3 development, VM, and more. Also, as every year, LWN's excellent kernel summit coverage is now freely available.

Windows Vista won't be released until the end of 2006, a Microsoft exec let slip in a presentation on Microsoft's campus yesterday. The next version of Windows was expected in the second half of 2006, but at a financial analyst conference in Washington, Microsoft senior VP Will Poole revealed it would not appear until the 2006 US holiday season. In related news, a senior Microsoft executive has identified Apple as an obstacle to Redmond's success.

Since we haven't posted anything about the new Windows Vista beta release lately... Stardock's Brad Wardell writes "I've put together a first look at the first beta of Windows Vista. In the coming days I hope to delve deep into the guts of Microsoft's new OS but I've tried to put together a decent overview of what Windows Vista is all about."

Friday, July 29th, 2005, is the 6th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. "Let's face it," the website reads, "System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work."

Apple's Lisa was one of the earliest computers to take advantage of the graphical user interface pioneered at Xerox PARC, and it was the first to feature a desktop file browser. Read about the development (and demise) of the venerable Lisa at Braeburn.

For the "bleeding edge," the FreeDOS distribution GNU/DOS 2005 has had 15 software updates so far, including those dealing with speed and bug fixes, an improved menu system, a new screen saver, and a new package management system since its release last month to prepare for GNU/DOS 2006, which should be released by this winter. You can download these updates at the official GNU/DOS Web page. Meanwhile, the operating system/programming language TextOS has been updated to versions v1.0b9 and v2.0b8, which are both faster and include an updated version of the supplied editor/file viewer. Download both versions at the official TextOS Web page.

Last Saturday on the 23rd of July Amigans worldwide celebrated the 20th birthday of the Amiga platform at several events and gatherings. It was the 23rd of July 1985 when the Amiga 1000 was unveiled to the public at the Lincoln Center in New York. At the three biggest Amiga birthday events there were also extensive AmigaOS4 presentations. Here is AmigaWorld's extensive report.

KDE 3.4.2 is the second maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. Changelog and download.

"When I initially published the article, Boot Fedora Linux Faster, neither my server or me was ready for 22k visitors in one day. It seems that there is a great interest in the topic of reducing boot time. So I think a challenge is in order to get Linux people together to try to reduce boot time."

GNOME 2.12 Beta 1 has been released. Download: platform, desktop and bindings.

"In this article I describe my experience with Mandrake/Mandriva and try to explain why it suits a starter in Linux and is still a usefull distro when you get more experience." Note that ReviewLinux.com has adopted a very confusing way of browsing through the article: you need to use the tabs on top.

Although many people claim that Linux is well on its way to replacing Unix, the reality is that Linux is Unix: a particular stream within a much wider community whose traditions and ideas both surround and extend those found in the Linux group.