Monthly Archive:: February 2006

GNOME 2.13.91 has been released. As always, the odd-numbered branches indicate dev-branches, and as such the 2.13.x series is the step-up to the GNOME 2.14 release, planned for March this year. The 2.13.91 release is the second beta. Release notes: platform, desktop, and bindings; downloads: platform, desktop, and bindings.

Novell plans to release a beta for its Linux Desktop 10 including new features offering better interoperability with Microsoft Office and Open Office, said Ted Haeger, Novell's director of user communities, at the Southern California Linux Expo. The beta, tentatively scheduled for release next month, will include a new feature, dubbed Xgl. Haeger said Xgl will allow users to jump between screens and multiple desktops. Targeted to CAD software users, Xgl has a practical side that allows users to have better window- and file-sharing capabilities.

"Apple has shiny new x86 based iMacs and the eloquently named MacBooks (yech) out on the market, and reviews, barring a few fawning toadies in the print media, are exceptionally rare. The usual Apple cooked benchmarks abound, but there is no real third party analysis, I think mainly because it is afraid of what will be found. The biggest bloomer is its tacit non-denials of the fact that the current x86 macs will never run XP in an approved or corporately acceptable fashion, and Vista is a long long long shot. Apple knows, is doing nothing to quell the rumours and speculation, and I think that's irresponsible."

"A lot of people complain about the Firefox 'memory leak(s)'. All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area. What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature."

"If we were to get dramatic, we would say: 'Intel came, Intel saw and Intel conquered.' The fact of the matter is, Intel did just that. It promised the holy grail of mobile computing by increasing performance without battery life trade off, and delivered on all promises. If you waited for the Core Duos to come out, you made a wise decision. Intel's Core Duo is the best you can buy in mobility right now. It runs cooler, faster and more efficiently than anything anyone has to offer right now."

Sun Microsystems is trying to persuade Hewlett-Packard to move its HP-UX Unix customers over to Sun's Solaris, Sun President/COO Jonathan Schwartz said at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. But HP is not interested, an HP representative said. During his presentation at the conference and in a subsequent interview, Schwartz said Sun has proposed merging the road maps of HP-UX and Solaris. And on a related note, HP will offer complete SUSE Linux server packages.

"Ever wonder how virtualization works? Where is it used? What role could virtualization play in the future of Windows, for example? How will it evolve over time? We recently met with some of the Microsoft Virtualization people to find some answers to these questions and learn a whole lot about virtualization, hypervisor, and the future of this super cool and important technology."

It seems like flee-in-Apple's-fur, cracker 'Maxxuss', has succeeded in cracking Mac OS 10.4.4 for Intel. "We were just about to hunker down and wait through the cold winter and a wet spring until we saw some results on the OS X 10.4.4 for Intel hacking efforts, but it looks like we're getting a little Valentines present from 'Maxxuss' who has already broken through Apple's heightened security that is present in their shipping version of the OS. It's just a preliminary release, not all hardware is supported and it requires a bit of futzing around to get it to work, but seeing as we weren't expecting this kind of breakthrough this early, we really can't complain."

IBM released a new PowerPC 970 workstation: the System p5 185. A 2-way 2.5GHz system with 2GB of RAM and two SCSI drives will set you back $4000 without any OS licenses. "The new System p5 185 Express server is our lowest priced system based on the IBM Power Architecture with features designed for excellent and secure performance whether running AIX 5L or Linux applications.

Apple released the fifth version for Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. A number of bugs are fixed and upgrade is recommended for all PPC, x86 and Server OSX users. This update focuses on iChat's video conferencing, Safari's rendering engine, usability of Dashboard widgets, iDisk syncing, and much more. It's available as a stand-alone download (delta | combo), and through Software Update.

OpenBinder is the core technology that ex-Be engineers started at Be, Inc. as the "next generation BeOS", finished implementing at PalmSource as one of the key foundations of the Cobalt system, and is now being open-sourced running for Linux. Dianne Hackborn, a legendary engineer throughout the BeOS history and later a key engineer in the creation of PalmOS Cobalt, is describing OpenBinder below and then a mini-interview follows.

On Feb. 15, Microsoft will release to testers first beta releases of three Office Live small-business subscription services. Office Live is a family of add-on services designed to complement Microsoft Office, the same way that the growing stable of Windows Live services will extend Microsoft Windows. The LiveSide.Net Web site on Feb. 13 posted details on Office Live Beta 1's availability, as well as some screen shots of the pending Office Live beta releases. The Office Live beta bits will be downloadable by testers starting at 6 a.m. PST Feb. 15, Microsoft officials said.

Sun Microsystems fulfilled a pledge Tuesday to release UltraSparc chip details in an effort to make it easier to bring Linux and versions of BSD Unix to its systems. Sun announced the availability of the specifications in conjunction with this week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, at which Sun President Jonathan Schwartz is delivering the opening keynote speech on Tuesday morning.

As one can already see by the activity of the mailing lists, Haiku seems to be moving forward in a serious pace. Studio-33 takes a look at the latest build (many screenshots included, boys and girls), and concludes: "I was pretty impressed by this build. Deskbar and espacially Tracker seemed much more stable and Haiku didn't crash every four or five minutes like previous builds I tested. Work on Haiku seems to go pretty fast lately and more and more pieces are getting finished. Offcourse Haiku still needs a lot of work to become somewhat useable, but it is definately going in the right direction."