Monthly Archive:: June 2006

Turning Wine Into Windows on a Mac

CodeWeavers is in early testing with CrossOver Office for Mac now and plans to release a final version of the software in July or August. Wine is a compatibility layer, not a true emulator, so it works with only some Windows programs. Developers at CodeWeavers and others on the open-source Wine effort have to work on each program they want to make compatible.

Lawsuit Calls Microsoft’s Anti-Piracy Tool Spyware

A computer user is suing Microsoft over the company's Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool, alleging that it violates laws against spyware. The suit by Los Angeles resident Brian Johnson, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle, seeks class-action status for claims that Microsoft didn't adequately disclose details of the tool when it was delivered to PC users through the company's Automatic Update system.

Intel Core Duo T2400 with Linux

Intel's Core Duo T2400 has a maximum operating frequency of 1.83GHz, 65nm process, 2MB of L2 cache, and 667MHz FSB; however, how does this dual-core component fare under Linux? Phoronix has taken a look at the Intel Core Duo T2400 in conjunction with the Lenovo ThinkPad T60, and has comparison results against the previous Pentium M 750 1.83GHz.

NVIDIA FreeBSD Kernel Feature Requests

In a mail to the FreeBSD hackers mailing-list, a very detailed request is made from Christian Zander at Nvidia, concerning several missing features in the FreeBSD kernel. In order for Nvidia to provide improved OpenGL performance and SLI support in the future for FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, several important tasks needs to be completed.

Borland Developer Group To Get New Owner Soon

The fate of Borland's developer tools group will finally be sealed in the next couple of months, as the software vendor works to finalize deal with a buyer. Nick Jackson, managing director of Borland DTG in the Asia-Pacific region, told ZDNet that the company, which announced its intention to divest its developer product lines on Feb. 8, has attracted about 16 qualified bidders so far.

Why Linux Has Failed Most Beginners

"Over the years, I've had a number of people asking me what I believe the problem was with further migration over to Linux by the public at large. To be frank, I don't believe that there is a simple answer to this. To me, there are a number of factors that play a role in keeping Linux out of the mainstream limelight" writes Matt Hartley in his opinion piece.

Ext4 Filesystem Development Plan Unveiled

A series of patches has been proposed on the Linux kernel mailing list earlier by a team of engineers from Red Hat, ClusterFS, IBM, and Bull to extend the Ext3 filesystem, adding support for very large filesystems. After a long discussion, the developers came forward with a plan to roll these changes into a new version: Ext4. LWN covered the changes as well as the arguments put forward for a new filesystem a few weeks back.

One Year Later: How Apple’s Intel Transition is Going

Apple sent a seismic shockwave through the Mac market a year ago when it announced that was ditching its long-time processor suppliers IBM and Motorola in favor of chips from occasional arch-nemesis Intel. The announcement came on June 6, 2005, during Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developers Conference keynote - by the end of 2007, the Apple CEO said, all Mac hardware would be running on Intel processors.

Office 2007 Slips; Will Vista Be Next?

Office 2007 is running late. Microsoft officials acknowledged on June 29 that the company will not meet the October 2006 business-availability target to which it committed in March of 2006. At that time, Microsoft officials said to expect retail availability of Office 2007 to be some time in January 2007, so as to coincide with the Vista launch. But on June 29, Microsoft revised its schedule. Now Microsoft is promising that Office 2007 will be available to volume licensees "by the end of year 2006", with retail availability in "early 2007". This does not stop MS from pondering about Vista's successor, though.

’23 Things We Want in Leopard’

"At the Worldwide Developers Conference in August, Apple plans to provide a sneak preview of the next major update to OS X, code named Leopard. Apple is typically tight-lipped about what to expect from Leopard, so we have no idea what new and improved features await us in August. But that's not stopping us from coming up with a list of things we'd like to see in OS X 10.5." And for when you're done reading.

Review: Opera 9.0; IE7 Beta 3 Released

"The last time I tried Opera, it was still advertisement supported, and offered me no real reason to choose their ad-free option for the money being asked. A number of people used to feel that Opera's ads were off-topic and more annoying than anything. I should be clear in saying that I support companies with a strong privacy policy using ads should they choose to. I just did not see the value in adding them to a browser that offered very little that other browsers did not. Today, this has changed. Opera is now ad free, and they have added some cool new functionality." On a related note, Microsoft has released the 3rd beta version of IE7 for Windows XP/2003.

Why KDE Moved From autotools to CMake

KDE is ditching the GNU autotools for development and building of their next version, KDE 4. Its replacement is CMake, developed by Kitware. Alexander Neundorf explains the choice in favor of CMake was mainly due to its support for all platforms KDE4 is meant to run on: Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, and even Windows. CMake generates specific command files for each of the 'native' build tools from one common source: Makefiles (for GNU make) or project files (for XCode on OS X, for MS Visual Studio, for KDevelop3). Current KDE 4 modules already build (with CMake) on more platforms than KDE 3 with autotools ever did, with full configure checking on all platforms and all compilers/IDEs. Scribus is now also moving to CMake.

Red Hat Partners Report More Customers Dropping Windows

Red Hat will announce its latest quarterly earnings today, and if the outlook of its partners provides any clue the report should be good for shareholders – as well as in future quarters. Especially interesting in a Wall Street analyst's recent report is a finding that 45% of Red Hat’s partners are seeing customers migrating from Windows to Red Hat. That trend could be a tremendous growth indicator for the Hatters since Microsoft dominates world markets and much of Red Hat's growth in the past has come at the expense of Unix or other Linux providers.

Understanding the Zend Framework, pt. 1: the Basics

A couple of years ago, PHP sat at the top of the powerful-but-easy-to-use scripting languages heap. And then - suddenly, Ruby on Rails hit the programming world like a ton of bricks. Did you really want a ditch it all for Ruby on Rails and start over? Of course not! What was needed was a new framework that incorporates many of these new advantages without dumping your previous PHP work in the garbage, Thus, the Zend Framework was born. This article shares the concepts behind the Zend Framework, including the Model-View-Controller pattern and the PHP coding standards.

Eight Key Tools for Oracle Applications Developers

Attendees of the recent New England Oracle Applications User Group conference got a refresher course on some of the key tools that Oracle developers use to customize E-Business Suite applications. Sridhar Bogelli, the leader of the session and founder and chief executive officer of Apps Associates, an application development consultancy, told attendees that properly using the tools provided by Oracle and third-party vendors can help developers and their companies avoid embarrassing, production-related problems.

Introducing Drosera

"I would like to introduce a new addition to the WebKit open source tools - a JavaScript debugger. Drosera, named after the largest genera of bug eating plants, lets you attach and debug JavaScript for any WebKit application - not just Safari. One of the unique things about Drosera, like the Web Inspector, is that over 90% of it is written in HTML and JavaScript. This is a true testament of what you can do with web technologies today and the rapid development that WebKit allows."