Monthly Archive:: September 2005

As expected, Sun said its new Sun Fire V490, V890, E2900, E4900 and E6900 servers are powered by UltraSparc IV+ processors with a clock speed of 1.5 gigahertz and run Sun's latest version of its Unix operating system, Solaris 10. The servers will also run earlier versions of Solaris.

MadPenguin is reviewing and raving for Ubuntu in an article with screenshot goodness.

On Monday, the Free Standards Group released the latest version of the Linux Standard Base, Version 3.0, and announced that Red Hat, Novell, the Debian Common Core Alliance and Asianux are all certifying their latest operating systems versions to it. Update: In a recent post on his blog, Red Hat's Ulrich Drepper makes some criticisms of the LSB and its shortcomings of the v3 certification process.

"Last week in Part I, we took a look at the AMD dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4800's performance on 64-bit Windows. As it turned out, Windows XP Pro X64 ran most 32-bit applications just fine on the X2 4800, and 64-bit code showed a few modest performance gains." This week, they focus on Intel.

"OpenBSD is an ultra-secure, freely available, multi-platform BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. And is arguably the most secure operating system in the world. After using OpenBSD for over 9 years I decided to place online some useful information for first time users of OpenBSD. The information here covers the current release of OpenBSD."

"I find Tiger to be a good release in terms of its stability and some of the new features that it offers but I don’t think it is as much of an upgrade as Panther was. Gaming performance under Tiger seems better, but not much, while other parts of the system seem more sluggish." Read the review here.

Red Hat announced on Monday at Oracle's OpenWorld in San Francisco that Oracle, EMC and Network Appliance now support its Global File System. The file system is based on the several technologies obtained by Red Hat in its 2003 purchase of Minneapolis-based Sistina Software. Red Hat then worked on the code and open-sourced it in June 2004.

Build applications for Linux while maintaining cross-platform capabilities using .NET languages.

"The growing popularity of open-source browsers and software may be responsible for the increasing gap between the exposure of a vulnerability and the provision of patch to fix it, security software vendor Symantec has said."

Over at BeBits there's some buzz as people download and try out a modded up version of Firefox titled QuickFox. "QuickFox is a 'mod' of mozilla/firefox bleeding edge. From order of importance: speed, useability, looks, reliability. It runs and loads in a RAM filesystem. It sports a fully automatic installation that will take care of everything for you. It includes auto setup on boot and shutdown to save your settings." Thanks to HaikuNews for pointing this out. As you are probably aware of by now, QuickFox is BeOS-only.

"Microsoft has tried to radically change the design philosophy behind its office suites from 2003 to office 12. The difference between the interface of Office 12 and Office 11 (2003) is nothing short of staggering. The attempt has been to enhance the user’s ability to actually get to the function he wants to use quickly and without getting lost in the labyrinth of toolbars and menus." You can find info on beta testing Office 12 here. In related news, the slides from the PDC presentations are now available for download.

This article outlines the designing and building of a Mini-ITX computer which runs off of a USB flash drive. The designer's goal was to build a system which was silent and as simple as possible. In the end it was little more than a USB drive, a VIA motherboard, and a case. Puppy Linux was used for an operating system due to its light weight and ability to boot off of a USB drive.

You're ready to be a card-carrying Linux geek, but with several different Linux distributions available, you don't know where to start. Which one offers the best balance of tools, performance, and price? Bryan Hoff takes you through the most popular Linux distros and introduces you to a brave new world without Windows.

At the PDC last week, Microsoft announced Windows Workflow Foundation as a key component of WinFX in conjunction with Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. This chapter describes the motivation behind Windows Workflow Foundation and provides an overview of its features