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Monthly Archive:: April 2007

Microsoft Changes Vista Licensing to Cover New Deployment Models

Microsoft has made changes to its licensing model for Windows Vista to meet the needs of enterprise customers in the finance and government sectors using bleeding-edge technologies. The software giant will announce April 2 a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops, which allows customers to use Windows in virtual machines centralized on server hardware. It is also giving its Software Assurance customers using Windows Vista Enterprise the license right to use Vista on diskless PCs - essentially machines without hard drives.

OS/2 20 Years Old Today: Dead But Still Walking

"In this anniversary, I'd like to shed some light about my first-hand experience with , especially since I see many attempts at history re-writing and over-simplification, when people compress OS/2's two decades into a single paragraph. An OS/2 user named Roger Perkins wrote to OS/2 newsgroups ten years ago: "Here's to OS/2's 10th Anniversary on April 2nd! No OS has ever died so many times!"

Windows Patch Due Early

Microsoft has decided to rush out a fix for a flaw in Windows, saying that the problem has become too serious to ignore. The flaw, which will be patched on Tuesday, was originally disclosed to Microsoft in December, but it was not publicly reported until last week. The bug lies in the way Windows processes .ani Animated Cursor files, which are used to create cartoon-like cursors in Windows.

The Nokia N80 as a VoIP Phone

Hi-Mobile sent us in the very popular Nokia N80 smartphone. While the phone was released about 10 months ago, just last month there was a brand new and free firmware upgrade that upgrades it to version 4.x which adds VoIP functionality. The upgrade is available for all N80 models, even the ones that were not released under the "Internet Edition" brand. Read more for our test.

Bernd Korz Ceases Zeta Development, Mulls Giving Sources to Haiku

Bernd Korz has announced that he will cease all development on Zeta , which effectively means Zeta will no longer be in development. Korz already wanted to quit development on Zeta when YellowTAB went belly up, but the numerous requests from customers to continue development eventually dragged him across the line. However, after the spat with Magnussoft, enough is enough for Korz. He states that he is not sure if and when the service pack to Zeta 1.5 will be released. He also states that he is not sure if and when he will open source or give to Haiku his contributions to Zeta. He explicitely states nor yT, nor Magnussoft own the source code to his work. My take: While I can understand Bernd, I am also sad to see this happen. For the little money and manpower Bernd had at his disposal, he did a magnificent job in making Zeta a usable operating system. I already knew this was about to happen, but a sad day it remains for Zeta users.

Review: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

"Sex appeal doesn't seem to be the focus of this release. Instead, Red Hat makes a strong statement in its competitive infrastructure in the form of well-executed virtualisation and user session controls in its RHEL5 release. The aggressive number of components inside this operating system still beg to be sewn together more comprehensively with better administrative tools, but the fundamentals are definitely in there."

Friedman: ‘Flamewars Are Part of the Community Culture’

"Nat Friedman has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the Linux desktop for a few year now. First with his own company Ximian, founded together with Mono chief architect Miguel de Icaza, after its acquisition now inside Novell. A few months ago he has been named 'Technologist of the Year' by the VarBusiness magazine for his work around the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Since then he has been promoted to Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source, besides the desktop he is also overseeing Novells server business now. During Novells Brainshare Andreas Proschofsky had the possibility to sit down with Friedman and talk about the Linux desktop, the consequences of the Microsoft agreement and the mistakes of the Hula project."

Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring RC3 Released

Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring RC3 'Beijing' is now available. Beijing features fixes to all major bugs in previous betas and release candidates, the final version of GNOME 2.18, and the full feature set intended for the final release. Both traditional installer-based Free editions and combined live/install CD One editions are available. Please consult the release notes for more information.

NixOS: a Purely Functional Linux Distribution

"NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix, a purely functional package management system. NixOS is an experiment to see if we can build an operating system in which software packages, configuration files, boot scripts and the like are all managed in a purely functional way, that is, they are all built by deterministic functions and they never change after they have been built."

Servers: ‘It’s the Stack, Stupid!’

"The server operating system wars never seem to slow down. Last week it was Red Hat's turn with the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which incorporates the Xen open source hypervisor. Naturally there's also the endless market speculation about the final feature set and likely arrival date of Windows Server 2007. And then there's Solaris, which with its nice value-add features like DTrace and its new status as open source software is making something of a comeback, it seems."

Building DVD Images of Ubuntu Repositories

"This howto offers a simple way of creating DVD images of Debian or Ubuntu http/ftp repositories. Ubuntu doesn't offer DVDs ready to download with its main, universe, multiverse and/or restricted repositories. With the contents of this howto you can do it yourself. Having the Ubuntu or Debian repositories on DVD can be useful for those users who don't have access to the Internet where they have their Ubuntu installed but have access somewhere else to download the repository and build and burn the DVDs."

Haiku: Where Are We At

"With Haiku getting closer and closer to an R1 release I think it is time for little review on the achievements of the development team in the last months. Haiku is being covered on various websites and blogs lately especially after attending SCaLE and the already famous tech talk at Google. But although it might seem that Haiku is only weeks away from the so important first release there is still a lot of work that has to be done, networking being the biggest." More here.