Monthly Archive:: March 2006

PowerDreams did an interview with Bernd Korz, CEO of YellowTAB. The original German version has been translated to English (by an Italian website). Interesting bits: "The LiveCD caught on unbelievably well and worldwide. We have more than 1 million CDs out in the market, thanks to many magazines." And, something that always interests me: "The response and level of publicity is surprisingly good and we have open doors everywhere at hardware manufacturers." That hardware part is crucial for the alternative OS market.

The DesktopBSD team has released their most important release to date-- DesktopBSD 1.0 is now available via .torrent or as a 'normal' download. The release includes KDE 3.5.1, FreeBSD 5.5-PRERELEASE, a user-friendlier package manager, and many more smaller improvements, which are detailed in the changelog and the release notes.

The KDE team has announced the release of KDE 3.5.2, a maintenance release of the 3.5 series which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and greatly enhanced support for existing translations and new translations. For more details, check the changelog. Binary packages for some distributions are available, and the sources are too, obviously.

"As we all know, the operating system is an essential part of any computer system, but what most of us don't understand are the intricacies of how OS environments operate. This article discusses the ways of extending the operating system by various ways including, but not limited to, recompiling the kernel and managing libraries. Extensibility is the need of time. It gives the user more 'power' over the machine, since every user can have his 'personalized' copy of the OS. This approach of extending the operating system at user level is more advantageous than other methods."

This project combines Ubuntu and MythTV into a lightweight, undemanding HTPC computer. "The plans were, roughly, to install a hard drive, move to a more powerful Linux distribution, and add PVR capabilites to the system. Because the computer was already situated in my living room, making it into a personal video recorder was an obvious choice, though doing this on a Mini-ITX Linux system would surely take a bit of finesse."

"For desktop users, monitoring resource usage is an important task. By doing this, we can locate system bottlenecks, plan what to do to optimize our system, identify memory leaks, and so on. The problem is which software one should use and how to use it according to our needs. Among many monitoring tools that are available, most people use 'top'. Top provides almost everything we need to monitor our system's resource usage within a single shot. In this article, all the information is based on procps 3.2.5 running on top of Linux kernel 2.6.x."

Virtual Appliances, a maker of nano-sized virtual machines for VMWare, announced their first release last week, an NFS/SMB to web server appliance for VMWare. Their base model is a 15MB download. The appliance is based on Gentoo Linux and is free to use.

Seems like NVFS (non volatile filesystem) is currently the #1 source of problems for Palm users and this Palm user thought it would be nice to give users some background information why it's causing all those problems and why Palm still decided to use it.

Microsoft employees are arguing among themselves over who is to blame for the delay in the launch of Windows Vista. One disgruntled insider named Who da'Punk voiced his feelings in a blog posting under the heading 'Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!'.

Yes, it has been 10 years since Palm Computing launched its first product, the Pilot 1000. The handheld pioneer has had a checkered decade of bad management decisions, botched acquisitions and increasing competition from phone companies. However, Palm said a new relationship with Microsoft, a focus on smart phones and a future of software partnerships have put the company back on track.

"On this day ten years ago, the first prototype StrongARM processor card was powered up by Acorn engineers. The experimental kit managed to run at a cool 228MHz, running software nearly six times faster than the 40MHz ARM710 processors used in RiscPCs at the time. The card, which drew one watt of power, would later go on sale in September 1996."

Phil Sim, a professional with technology editor journalist background, has written three interesting blog posts recently, discussing the much-rumored Google OS (1, 2, 3). He speculates that all user's data will be stored online on Google's servers and so one's desktop and files can be retrieved exactly as left by any other PC station, anywhere in the world, by simply using his Gmail credentials. It's like having your OS on a usb key with you at all times, only, without the usb key...

Fresh on the heels of a delay in broad availability of Windows Vista, Microsoft confirmed late Thursday that it is also pushing the mainstream launch of Office 2007 to next year. As with Vista, Microsoft hopes to finish the code for Office 2007 this year. The company said work will be completed by October, when it will make Office 2007 available to business customers that have signed up for Microsoft's volume-licensing program. And, again like Vista, Microsoft plans to ship retail and original equipment manufacturer versions of the product in January. UPDATE: Microsoft has joined a committee that has a key role in the ratification of the OpenDocument format as an international standard.

"Ever tried this query in Google: "Linux-like environment for Windows" with inverted commas? If you have, it gives exactly 13700 results. Now try the same other way around. Google "Windows environment for Linux" but don't use the quotes from previous query. It yields approximately 1150 results. This clearly shows that there are numerous applications that simulate a Linux environment on Windows and vice versa. But are all these applications really required?"