Monthly Archive:: December 2005

"I have already written about configuring my FreeBSD IPsec gateway and workstations. In this article I will show how I configured my Windows XP box to use the same gateway. You might ask why I'm writing about Windows XP on a website about FreeBSD? My terse answer is because I can. My realistic answer is because it will help people. It's something I did, with my FreeBSD gateway. I use XP on a regular basis. Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's XP. Sometimes it's FreeBSD."

The SCO Group's revenue continued to fall in the fourth quarter and during fiscal 2005, as Unix sales slumped. Management, however, tried to put a positive spin on the results, released after Thursday's market close, saying that cost-cutting measures have made SCO's Unix business profitable again and adding that plenty of cash remains to continue a legal battle against IBM.

Windows Vista will improve search functionality on a PC by letting users tag files with metadata, but those tags could cause unwanted and embarrassing information disclosure, Gartner analysts warned.

"The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce version 0.2.9 of its operating system, designed to be binary compatible with Windows drivers and applications. This release brings improvements to the network model allowing applications such as firefox to run, significant improvements in Plug and Play support now provide a basic working model able to detect and load drivers, plus many other feature additions and bug fixes. We also now provide vmware player images on our download page. The full changelog can be found here, and screenshots are available here."

Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind HTML, the first web server (running on a NeXT cube), and the first web browser, has started his own weblog. From the first entry: "In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights. Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space."

The Cairo vector-based graphics library now has a BeOS port, courtesy of Christian 'biesi' Biesinger. The Cairo library is used in Gecko 1.8 - the engine behind Firefox 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.0 - for SVG and CANVAS tag support, although future plans involve it receiving heavier use for general rendering, and is also receiving increasing use within GTK+, with 2.8 having inital support for it. The availability of this library on BeOS should aid the native porting of GTK+ in the future as well as ensuring that Mozilla products have a future on the platform, and its almost certain to see wider adoption in the future.

eComStation 2.0 beta 1 is available for eCS Software Subscribers. The most significant updates on this beta version are: SNAP/ENT, the special licensed version of SNAP by Serenity is in there, we boot SNAP directly from CD-ROM; bootable JFS, this version is able to install on bootable JFS volumes; ACPI, this version installs and detects ACPI.

The European Commission has threatened to fine Microsoft up to 2m euros a day until it gives rivals more access to its systems. Brussels said the software giant had failed to supply adequate information about its server programs. Microsoft has five weeks to provide improved documentation before the daily penalties are imposed. But the company pledged to contest the EU's "unjustified" demands by whatever means possible. Update: Microsoft contests.

Among the many milestones in the tech world this last year, one occurred almost without notice. The Bay Area NeXT Group, an important user group formed 15 years ago around Steve Jobs' second great computer design, slipped into history in 2005, even as the technology that sparked it reached millions of users under a new name: OS X.

"The first major version release of the X Window System in more than a decade, X11R7.0, is the first release of the completely modularized and autotooled source code base for the X Window System. X11R6.9, its companion release, contains identical features, and uses the exact same source code as X11R7.0, but with the traditional imake build system."

Yes it would be nice if X.org could use OpenGL directly for it's display and composition, but to date, nobody has made this possible. Is it wrong for a business to make it so? Since when does developing software for GNU products mean that they aren't allowed to do it privately? If Novell is developing XGL behind closed doors, and paying the developers to build it... Where's the problem?

Sun has released the 1/06 update for the Solaris 10. You can check out what's new (whatever happened to ye good ol' changelog?) or download it (here I was going to put something about whatever happened to ye good ol' direct download, but nevermind).

Gil Amelio had been on Apple's board for less than a year before he was tapped to be Michael Spindler's successor. As CEO, he would transform Apple from the inside out, and set it up for Steve Jobs's triumphant return. Read an account of Gil Amelio's 500 days as CEO of Apple Computer here.

"QEMU version 0.8.0 is out. New features include: support for ARM Integrator/CP board system emulation; support for MIPS R4K system emulation; initial SMP support on x86 (up to 255 CPUs); many new audio emulation features; initial USB support; new networking options for VLAN support between several QEMU instances." The changelog is here, downloads are here.