Monthly Archive:: April 2006

When I started this whole Sunday Eve Column thing, I was painfully aware I was basically doing the same thing as a certain other individual who somehow insists on using the first letter of his middle name (maybe because he thinks it makes him look cool?). I believe that person only writes his columns to make money. And that's just sad.

After months and months of work, the PC-BSD team released v1.0 final. "PC-BSD software is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD 1.0 for x86 based processors. This first 'non-beta' release of PC-BSD ushers in a new era of stability and simplicity for desktop operating systems based on UNIX. Powered by the latest FreeBSD 6.0 and integrated with KDE 3.5.2, PC-BSD provides a solid server base, while being user-friendly enough to run as a primary desktop system." Changelog, release notes, and download, of course.

"Freedom, openness, security - these principles lead OpenBSD development. The song for this release, Blob!, and the new artworks that promote them. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed OpenBSD's team of Blob-Busters and discussed new features of OpenBSD 3.9 along with freedom (and quality!) threats."

"When Richard Stallman learned that a compiler architect from ATI would be speaking at MIT, he immediately started organizing a protest against ATI's damaging free software policies. It all started, like most good protests, with a trip to Kinko's printing to make a sign. The request came from Richard Stallman for a 3'x2' sign, mounted and able to be carried with one hand easily. Several frustrating minutes with Inkscape, two trips to the store and one foam-core backing later, we had our sign, and it stated our message clearly in black letters on white background."

Apparantly, Apple is interested in porting Sun Solaris' ZFS to Mac OS X. From the zfs-discuss mailinglist: "Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple's CoreOS organization is interested in porting ZFS to OS X. For more information, please e-mail him directly at . Speaking for the zfs team (at Sun), this is great news and we fully support the effort."

Microsoft has released the first of two betas planned for its Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 product. Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 will support AMD Virtualization and Intel Virtualization Technology, giving customers better interoperability, strengthened isolation to prevent corruption of one virtual machine from affecting others on the same system, as well as improved performance for non-Windows guest operating systems.

Microsoft said the weaker earnings came as it invests money in its services push and also as it tries to ramp up production of the Xbox 360 games console. Microsoft on Thursday reported third-quarter sales and earnings that were below what some analysts were expecting, and said future earnings will be dented as it aims to boost its Windows Live Internet services and other new businesses.

Solaris Express 4/06 has been released. You can click here to download this release. There have been some minor bugfixes and some relatively noteworthy additions in this release (including PostgreSQL and PCIe support). Sun has a nice, detailed list of new features for this release.

PCMag reviews Google's SketchUp beta. "Google SketchUp Beta, the brand new, free 3D drawing tool isn't an obvious fit for the Google desktop application canon. However, this blend of vector-based 3D drawing and CAD-like control lets you rapidly build 3D models that can be exported to numerous bitmap and compressed file formats and, more importantly, geo-coded and shared on the company's Google Earth satellite imagery program, which is also free. So, it's a undeniably cool, oddball app that has the potential to turn one of Google's most popular services, Google Earth, into an even more powerful and personal tool."

"Despite the head start that KDE enjoyed, the large number of KDE users and developers, and Linus Torvalds personally endorsing KDE, GNOME has won the desktop environment battle. The final victory came with the third piece of a corporate trifecta, giving GNOME the official nod from Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and finally Novell. The question is, will the triumph of GNOME lead to the rise or downfall of the Linux desktop?" Run Forrest! Run!

FreeSoftwareMagazine reviews the Sun Ultra 3 mobile workstation, and concludes: "As a portable development unit it is a dream. The ability to effectively run both a client and a deployment environment on the same machine at reasonable speeds certainly makes a difference to your ability to work while mobile. The size of the display and the speed of the unit make it ideal for working with multiple source files, or within environments like Sun Studio or Eclipse, both of which ran perfectly. The binary compatibility is obviously key for those who need a portable SPARC unit, but I could just as easily see it being used as a Java or script based development platform."

"I'm glad to announce SUSE Linux 10.1 Codename 'Agama Lizard' RC3. We have fixed the majority of bugs from RC3 and look forward to the goldmaster - if testing does not show serious problems." Okay, I will try not to mention the lack or release information this time.

"This site intends to stimulate interest in coding for the Haiku OS by offering financial compensation to software developers once they have completed one of our code bounties." Donate away, boys and girls.

Zmanda, Inc. introduced recently the first business-ready open source backup solution: the Zmanda Network is a suite of enterprise-ready software and services based on the popular Amanda open source data backup and recovery technology. Today we are very happy to feature a mini-interview with Zmanda's CEO, Chander Kant.