Monthly Archive:: February 2007

A review of KateOS Live 3.2 Beta. "KateOS is a Polish (and polished!) distribution which is completely community-driven. The effects of the community work are pretty impressive. Kate is original and has its own feeling. Each new release of the system brings a few decent innovations and offers an even better GNU/Linux lightweight multimedia desktop. In my opinion it will soon be able to compete with other popular lightweight Linux-based systems like Xubuntu or Zenwalk."

The KDE project announces the availability of the third development snapshot of the upcoming KDE 4. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE 4 will provide, those who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE 4 platform and for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE 4. This snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable, the interfaces are subject to changes at any time.

IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle's recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said on Friday. This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle - and not IBM - to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.

"Apple has said that Jobs knew of backdated option grants but "was unaware of the accounting implications", and an internal investigation cleared him of misconduct. Still, according to media reports, he's been questioned by authorities at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the investigation by federal authorities is ongoing. With such questions still swirling, some wonder about the possible downside of leaning so heavily on one person to drive the company's success - and what the Jobs-friendly board is doing to prepare for the possibility of losing its star pitchman."

"Windows Vista has been available to consumers for nearly a month now. Many new and revamped PCs incorporating Microsoft's latest operating system have been released, with lots more on the way. So far, we've looked at a range of Vista desktops from gaming rigs to all-in-one PCs to low-end machines, and by and large, we've liked what we've seen." By the way, some people really go to great lengths to... Well, I don't know.

Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.

The NetBSD Foundation announced that Force10 Networks, the pioneer in building and securing high performance networks, has leveraged NetBSD as the foundation for the Force10 Operating System (FTOS). Based on the open source UNIX-like system, FTOS provides the software scalability and resiliency that powers the Force10 TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers.

FreeBSD has a reputation of being slow in combination with MySQL, especially when compared to Linux. However, some recent improvements in the scheduler shows that FreeBSD now is pretty much on par with Linux. It also shows that Linux scales very badly after a certain amount of threads per CPU.

Linux distributor TerraSoft is accepting pre-orders for Sony Playstation 3 gaming devices pre-installed with Linux. Linux is installed alongside the Playstation 3's native gaming OS.

"Last month, in the first installment of this three-part series, I looked at Windows Vista kernel enhancements in the areas of processes and I/O. This time I'll cover advances in the way Windows Vista manages memory, as well as major improvements to system startup, shutdown, and power management." More here.

"Samsung knows a thing or two about designing notebooks. The Q35 Red that I recently reviewed created quite a stir every time I pulled it out of my bag at CES last month, and the ultra-slim Q30 won over many users who were looking for a machine that was ultra-thin and light. But now the Samsung design team has pushed the boat out and created the new Aura series of notebooks, which look set to go head to head with Apple's ultra-stylish MacBooks."

"Many changes have gone into the SUSE Linux operating system since version 10.1, including a name change: the entire operating system is now known only as openSUSE. All of those changes appear to have been for the better - openSUSE 10.2 is as great a release as 10 was - but despite the improvements and bug fixes, there are still several underlying problems that prevent openSUSE 10.2 from being competitive with commercial desktop operating systems."

The release focuses on bug fixes, better connectivity and support for additional devices. Changelog is here. You can dowload the client here. Please note that the server-side was upgraded too and has introduced a small rendering bug with the mobile OSNews menu; hopefully it will be resolved soon.

AmiKit 1.3.0 has been released. "We are very proud to announce the AmiKit now supports modern icon formats. This is the first time the OS3.x based environment is able to show and use PNG, dual PNG and OS4 icons. Moreover, Directory Opus Magellan II (included in AmiKit) is able to use them too." Indulge yourself in the screenshots, boys and girls.