Monthly Archive:: December 2006

"I noticed some tiny disturbance in the force before Christmas as Thom Holwerda posted two articles about what he felt was the sorry state of free desktops. Seems most people in the GNOME camp simply ignored the article as irrelevant, but Aaron Segio of Trolltech and KDE let it somewhat get to him. Personally I felt Thom kinda pointed out some troublesome points, but that his context and conclusion was wrong."

Just in time for the new year, the PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PC-BSD version 1.3 for public download. You may download this release and view the change log. The team is also launching a web design contest for the new web site of 2007.

"Face it, Windows Vista is just so played these days. With that preliminary biz release under its belt, we're ready for bigger and better things, and luckily a certain "jameskyton" drive-by-blogger has the low-down for us on Vista's successors, Fiji and Vienna". Read more at Engadget.

Since it's year end, I thought I'd post one more "fun piece" for everybody. After Thom posted an article on his customized KDE desktop, I thought it might be interesting to compare desktop screengrabs and see what other OSNews'ers desktops look like. Are you cluttered or clean? Are you minialist? What's your wallpaper? Upload a picture to an online service or your own website and show off your desktop. I'll start: Adam's desktop (312kb).

Judging by details revealed in a chip conference agenda, the clock frequency race isn't over yet. IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco.

"While 64-bit support is now considered common for both Intel and AMD processors, many Linux (as well as Windows) users are uncertain whether to use a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system with there being advantages for both paths. With this being the last Phoronix article for 2006, we decided to take this opportunity to look at the common question of whether to use 32-bit or 64-bit software. In this article, we will be comparing the i386 and x86_64 performance with Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft and Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 1 to see how the numbers truly stack up."

Apple Computer gave Chief Executive Steve Jobs 7.5 million stock options in 2001 without the required authorization of the company's board, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. Records purporting to show that a full board meeting had taken place to approve the remuneration, as required by Apple's procedures, were later falsified, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report comes after Apple shares fell as much as 6 percent on Wednesday on a report in legal trade publication The Recorder that federal prosecutors were looking at 'apparently falsified' stock option documents in their probe of Apple's previous grants. Update: Apple released new information about its allocation of stock options on Friday, defending CEO Steve Jobs following speculation that a key document had been forged.

Red Hat plans to ship the next version of its premium Linux product on February 28, debuting major virtualization technology but missing an earlier deadline by about two months. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 had been scheduled to ship by the end of 2006. However, the company gave itself scheduling wiggle room in September, when Red Hat released the first RHEL 5 beta; a second beta arrived in November.

The Russian site Mobile-Review reviews Nokia's second version of their WebKit web browser (which was derived from WebCore/KHTML). This new unreleased-yet version offers WML support, opening links in new windows, display rotation, saving of any image, password manager, offline browsing, ATOM feed support, FlashLite 2.0 (no, this has no YouTube or other fancy Flash support) and much more. The first smartphones to offer WebKit's 2.0 browser will be the Nokia 6290 and N95 (which they will be running the new Symbian S60 3.1 version) that are scheduled to be released around April '07. If we were allowed for our own share of speculation, we would say that Apple's and Google's upcoming phones will be using a port of this open source browser too.

IBM's Lotus Software division is taking a bigger bite of Apple's Mac OS X. The company on Dec. 28 formally rolled out the latest version of its Lotus messaging software package, dubbed Notes 7.0.2, which will include e-mail, calendar management tools and instant messaging that is specifically designed for Mac OS X users.

Apart from a new newsletter, ReactOS has also published its sixth interview with one of the developers. Art Yerkes, born in Philadelphia, PA, USA in 1974. He's been involved with ReactOS since 2002 and contributed primarily to the keyboard code in win32k and the network code. Lately much of the work has been networking related, as well as slowly giving birth to a PowerPC architecture port.

Mark Shuttleworth writes: "We are a somewhat chaotic crowd, the software libre army. Thousands of projects (hundreds of thousands, if you consider Sourceforge as a reference point). Hundreds of thousands of contributing developers from virtually every country and timezone. We are a very loosely coupled bunch. But sometimes I wish it were easier to keep track of changes and have a slightly clearer view of progress across that whole galaxy." Eugenia agrees.

"In February 2003, the program 'Open Source and Open Source Software for the Dutch government' started, funded by the Dutch government. One of the main tasks was to make the government independent from single software suppliers, among which are Microsoft and SAP. After three years, the effort starts bearing fruit. Ten big municipalities - together 2.7 million inhabitants and including Amsterdam and The Hague - signed a manifest. I'll try to explain what's in the manifest, what that might mean for the future, and for the monopoly of Microsoft in the Dutch government."

The upcoming 2.6.20 Linux kernel is bringing a virtualization framework for all virtualization fans out there. It's called KVM, short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Not only is it user-friendly, but also of high performance and very stable, even though it's not yet officialy released. This article tries to explain how it all works, in theory and practice, together with some simple benchmarks.