Monthly Archive:: March 2006

The JNode team has released version 0.2.3 of the JNode operating system. JNode is an open source operating system written completely in Java (with a very small assembler nano-kernel). New features and improvements in this release are many classpath patches, improvements in AWT, Swing and desktop support, various bugfixes in the JIT compiler, ISO9660 support, better support for testing JNode with Mauve (mauve plugins, invoker commands), and more. Screenshots are available.

GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, version 4.1 has been released. The list of changes details the improvements. The Fedora team has already incorporated it and Fedora Core 5 will have 4.1 as the system compiler with GCC 3.2 provided as an alternative for compatibility reasons.

The first release candidate for GNOME 2.14 is out. This is the last GNOME unstable release before the big .0 release. Lots of new features and bug fixes have been added during this cycle; Davyd's 'Look at GNOME 2.14' tells you which. Download the platform, desktop, admin and bindings sources.

ActiveWin reviews the latest Windows Vista build, and concludes: "Microsoft is going in the right direction. They are thinking through the user experience, they understand what users want, they know that deployment is important; security, management, reliability: all those things are important, but they need to be easier to use and manage and that is the aim of Vista, to make it all easier."

"As a Linux user, there are times when you have to play nicely with users of Windows or Mac OS - such as when they send you Microsoft Word files. When you receive a Word file, you can either follow Richard Stallman's advice and refuse it, or bite the bullet and work with it. Modern Linux word processors - such as OpenOffice.org Writer, AbiWord, KWord, and TextMaker - can deal with most Word files. But if you don't want to fire up a word processor in order to read or print the document, you can turn to the command line. A handful of small but powerful Linux command line utilities make viewing, printing, and even converting Word files to another format, a breeze."

Geekpatrol benchmarks Rosetta performance, and concludes: "I'm impressed with Rosetta; Geekbench performance running under Rosetta is 40% to 80% of what it is running natively. Plus, running Geekbench under Rosetta is comparable to running Geekbench natively on a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz (our baseline system), at least in the single-threaded tests."

Ultimate++ 602 has been released. Ultimate++ is a C++ platform. U++ competes with popular scripting languages while preserving C/C++ runtime characteristics. New features of the 602 release include a new report package, otimization of C++ refactoring and assistance (Assist++), and improvements in project organization and building.