Monthly Archive:: September 2005

"Ten days of presentations, workshops, and chaotic coding sponsored by Trolltech, Novell/SUSE, HP, the local governments of Andalucia, and Malaga can only mean one thing: aKademy 2005, the KDE community's annual conference. Held in Malaga, Spain, aKademy 2005 included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon. Users, developers, and local visitors with an interest in open technology were treated to a display of stable desktop software and glimpses of cutting-edge innovations to come."

"The biggest thing they have done is to add more drivers and update the look in order to bring BeOS to users who could not have installed it before and attract new users to discover what made it great. This is a good thing, but I just can't get behind this OS as of yet. There are too many problems and rough patches. If you want the best way to use BeOS, this is it. If you are looking for the best desktop OS, I cannot recommend Zeta."

This chapter at InformIT covers the basic operation of PostgreSQL, including naming conventions, creating a database, and indexing.

"Although a relatively new platform, Tablet PC continues to revitalize and broaden its appeal to developers. By expanding existing features, adding new investments, and simplifying deployments, developing for Tablet PC becomes even more alluring with Windows Vista. There are some interesting PDFs available on what Windows Vista has in store for the Tablet PC."

More from Paul Thurrot today, as he reviews the N editions of Windows: "If you're wondering what the XP N Editions are like, wonder no more. I got my hands on both XP Home N and XP Pro N this week and gave them both a spin. The results were pretty uneventful. I can't recommend the XP N Editions per se, but I can report that you shouldn't be afraid of using these products at all. They're not crippled or broken in any way I can see."

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I'm happy to announce that the release process for NetBSD 2.1 has begun. Those of you paying close attention will notice that NetBSD 2.1 RC3 is available in the "daily builds" section of your local FTP mirror, and we encourage you to test it out and report any major bugs using send-pr(1)."

"If you're planning on using Fluxbox, the key is, like everything in Linux is that you learn a little something and have fun doing it. Experiment with different styles and configuration. That is one of the advantages to this type of window manager - you can make it look like you want."

"We consider Mono 1.1.9 stable enough to recommend it for all users. Those upgrading from the 1.0.x series should note that these notes only contain the differences between 1.1.8 and 1.1.9."

Sun plans to ship 8-core and 6-core versions of the Niagara processor in single socket servers before year end, according to sources. The decision to produce 6-core parts came as Sun tried to make best use of chip yields from its partner TI. In addition, Sun can now offer a couple of different prices with the Niagara-based systems, pitching the 6-core gear as lower-end. Based on 1.0GHz and eventually 1.2GHz chips, a Niagara server will consume on average 250 watts - versus close to four times that amount for similarly performing Xeon-based four-way servers.

As the cross development SDK for AmigaOS 4 isn't released yet, the idea to do an unofficial guide to setting up a cross-compiler was born. This document will describe how to do just that. This document also expects you to have some knowledge of Linux or Cygwin, as these are the platforms used in this document.

Global Business Object (GBO) is a technology that provides a portable Java library enabling developers to generate culture-sensitive GUI controls in a J2EE environment. Currently, GBO includes five globalization features: Name, Address, Pop-up Calendar, Date Chooser, and Time Chooser and supports 24 languages and their corresponding locales.

Next week's 'Patch Tuesday' was already going to be quiet, with an update only for Windows. On Friday, Microsoft pulled that update, saying more testing is needed. In related news, officials at the Mozilla Foundation on Friday acknowledged that a potentially dangerous code execution hole exists in fully patched versions of its flagship Firefox web browser. Update: Seems like there already is a (temporary) fix available.

One of the most anticipated presentations at this year's KDE World Summit, better known as aKademy, was Zack Rusin's intriguing 'Beauty and Magic for KDE developers'. Zack is a long-time KDE developer who has recently been hired to work full time at Trolltech. As the developer conference continued, more and more people heard of the amazing visual effects (.avi) that Zack was going to demonstrate. Here is an interview with him.

Windows uses a file system called NTFS, today's Linux distributions primarily use ext3, and like two warring tribes, the two barely speak. Fortunately, there's a handy tool from Paragon Software Group called NTFS for Linux, which acts like an interpreter for these battling nations. For Linux users hampered by lack of communication with Windows, Paragon's NTFS for Linux presents an elegant and effective solution.