Monthly Archive:: February 2007

"With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the second in a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Mandriva Free 2007 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."

"On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed 'Kludge', the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library." Read on for an overview.

Can you ignore DDE as a programmer on Windows? "While it was a reasonable solution back in the cooperatively-multitasked world of 16-bit Windows where it was invented, the transition to 32-bit Windows was not a nice one for DDE. Specifically, the reliance on broadcasts to establish the initial DDE conversation means that unresponsive programs can jam up the entire DDE initiation process. The last shell interface to employ DDE was the communication with Program Manager to create program groups and items inside those groups. This was replaced with Explorer and the Start menu back in Windows 95. DDE has been dead as a shell interface for over ten years."

"Asus has produced the first laptop in the world that makes use of Windows Vista SideShow to support a secondary screen in the lid. This is a 2.8in screen with a QVGA resolution of 320x240, just like any number of mobile phones that are on the market. The lid of the Asus also holds 1GB of flash memory which stores a cut-down Operating System that powers SideShow and which also links to the main Vista Operating System."

LinuxLookup reviews the Qtopia Greenphone, and concludes: Trolltech is attempting to 'ride on the shoulders' of such a community, hoping that their new platform will take off. Some of the steps they are taking are very good, such as providing a downloadable Community SDK (with licensing limitation), so that a budding software developer can write and test code without having to invest the whopping USD 700 for the hardware. In my opinion, the platform definitely has potential, but as far as being a truly hacker friendly device, I think the above license agreement says it all." Elsewhere, Penang is readying a Linux-based dual-mode WiFi GSM/GPRS phone.

Boudewijn Rempt writes about the KDE image manipulation program Krita. He writes about Flake support and various features regarding image rendering quality like a new fast scaler. Zack Rusin writes about the ongoing effort to port WebKit to Qt4 for possible inclusion in KDE 4. A new issue of the KDE Commit-Digest has also been released, telling us about various topics like NetworkManager support in KDE 4 or the installment of techbase.kde.org. In addition, this document presents what has been accomplished in the Nepomuk-KDE project so far.

Microsoft has released a list of 800 applications that should run properly on its new Windows Vista operating system. As expected, virtually all of Microsoft's own offerings are on the list - including the latest Office 2007 products. Also included are a host of business and security applications from vendors ranging from Intuit to Trend Micro. And desktop applications from Google, which ramped up its rivalry with Microsoft earlier this week with the introduction of online business applications, made the cut. However, noticeable by their absence are applications from a number of the world's biggest software companies, including Adobe Systems, IBM, and Symantec.

"If you haven't heard of F-Script you really should take a look at it as it can help you in many situations. I must admit I haven't been using it for long, but already what I've seen has impressed me. I was introduced to F-Script at WWDC 06 and thought it was something interesting but didn't pick it up till about a month ago."

"At Macworld 2007, the Apple Developer Connection hosted 48 developers in the ADC Developer Pavilion. Located just next to the Apple booth, these developers were able to present their products at the biggest Mac customer event of the year. Thousands of attendees flowed through the ADC Developer Pavilion, talked with the developers, and test drove the products. To find out more about the developers in the pavilion, we interviewed nine of them." There's also a set of pictures. In one of the pictures, the banner uses Comic Sans.

"This tutorial shows how to implement SPF in a Postfix 2.x installation. The Sender Policy Framework is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. There are lots of SPF extensions and patches available for Postfix, but most require that you recompile Postfix. Therefore we will install the postfix-policyd-spf-perl package from openspf.org which is a Perl package and can be implemented in existing Postfix installations (no Postfix compilation required)."

It's been a long road to recovery, but after years of mediocre releases, and months of delays in the development process, FreeBSD is finally back on its feet with 6.2-RELEASE. Though it is an excellent operating system, even this latest version offers few or no competitive advantages over Solaris or the other BSDs in a server role, and can never hope to compete with commercial GNU/Linux distributions for desktop computers. FreeBSD 6.2 is what FreeBSD 5.0 needed to be, and for those who have already switched to other operating systems, there are few or no compelling reasons to go back. More here.

The 2007 road map for the Ubuntu Linux operating system includes continuing its focus on the desktop, paying more attention to the server and garnering additional corporate support. Speaking at Ubuntu user conference UbuCon at Google's New York complex on Feb. 16, Steve George, director of support and services at Canonical, said, "The view from the Ubuntu side is that Microsoft has too much of the market. We're going to continue rolling out and making Ubuntu easy to use on the desktop and we'll add increased focus on the server this year."

Apparently, Matt Dillion has decided to roll his own filesystem for DragonFly. "Here is my initial outline of the filesystem design. It is open for discussion. Please feel to ask questions for anything you do not understand. I do not intend to start coding anything for at least two weeks. There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

Is Windows Vista really the indispensable upgrade that Microsoft wants you to think it is? ZDNet's Kingsley-Hughes says: "Having been using Vista for over 18 months I believe that it's a huge improvement over XP and even though I still use XP I find that I miss many of the features that Vista offers. However, I wouldn't call any of the changes earth-shattering." My take: That is about the most sensible Vista-related conclusion I have read so far.