Monthly Archive:: June 2007

Francois 'mmu_man' Revol has released a preliminary port of the Open Sound System to Haiku/BeOS. "I have the pleasure to announce I have ported OSSv4.1test to BeOS. It's not finished yet, but it runs and plays some sound. The goal is to use its drivers to get wider audio support for Haiku, the Free software rewrite (under BSD/MIT) of BeOS."

The Etoile project has released a release candiate for the 0.2 version of their live CD. "The Etoile project aims to produce a document-centric desktop and post-desktop environment. The project is built on top of GNUstep, a high-quality Free Software implementation of the OpenStep specification from Sun and NeXT and popularised by Apple as Cocoa."

WinAROS, which allows you to easily install a virtual copy of AROS to run inside Windows, has seen a new version. "There is a new version of WinArosLight This time it comes with installation and uninstallation programs. The setup program will create a shortcut on the desktop. It has never been easier to try AROS."

Google lost its recent antitrust battle with Microsoft on Tuesday when a US District Court judge overseeing latter company's antitrust settlement declined to accept Internet search giant's request to extend the US government oversight of Microsoft's antitrust efforts. US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was scheduled to review the report in a hearing on June 26, in her ruling, refused to consider Google's petition to have the agreement extended beyond November, when major parts of it expire.

The Singularity team at Microsoft has recently published a new article concerning their research OS. It is a concise introduction to the Singularity project. It summarizes research in Singularity 1.0 and highlights ongoing research for Singularity 2.0.

"Many directories in the UNIX file system serve a special purpose, and certain directories are named per long-standing convention. In this instalment of the 'Speaking UNIX' series, discover where UNIX stores important files."

A number of iPhone reviews were released today on the net: NYTimes, WSJ, MSNBC and USAToday. All seem to agree that the iPhone is a worthy device with few flaws.

The Linux community is splitting - right down the middle, at this point - over Microsoft's controversial claims that the open-source operating system infringes on patents it holds. Last Tuesday, Mandriva became the third Linux vendor within five days to say it isn't interested in signing a licensing deal with Microsoft to avoid possible infringement claims. A blog posting to that effect by Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon followed similar declarations by officials at Red Hat and Canonical.

"There's a problem with Solaris and Sun knows it. The installation experience of Solaris (along with other areas) could be greatly improved. The installer doesn't 'suck' as it's easy and known to Solaris administrators, but for a Linux or Windows user it could prove to be a bit challenging. For those of you that have never tried out Solaris, what we've decided to do is to show you this 'usability gap' with the installation process in Solaris compared to Linux. Is the experience really that bad?"

"The Series 5 pocket computer from Psion was launched 10 years ago this week. It was a remarkable achievement: entirely new silicon, a new operating system, middleware stack and applications were developed from scratch in just over two years. This was the last time anyone undertook such a daunting task: it may be the last time anyone ever tries, either."

Firefox add-ons, or extensions, are small programs that run inside the browser in order to customize some behaviors. In theory, it is possible to develop and maintain a multilingual, multiversion and multiOS Firefox add-on. In practice, there are many obstacles to overcome in order to create and to maintain a working Firefox add-on in one language for one Firefox version and for one OS.

As was to be expected, the Longhorn Reloaded team has been shut down by Microsoft. "It is with sad news that I have to inform you that today due to a cesit and decist letter we recived from Microsoft we are no longer able to provide you with a download link to Longhorn Reloaded. It deeply saddens me that although Microsoft hknew about this project for many months they only issued us with this notice a few days after we started to distribute the iso via torrents and ftp server."

"Let's face it; some distributions have better controls for handling display issues than others. Two that do it right out of the box that come to mind include Fedora (Red Hat) and openSUSE (Novell). Each includes tools that minimize the need to do what I gleefully refer to as the 'Xorg dance'. Basically, these options mean you are going to be spending more time exploring what these distros have to offer, yet less time wondering why your resolution looks completely off. Unfortunately, even with the latest release of Ubuntu, we have yet to see this level of functionality."

"The Free Software community is well known for its diversity. This is most obvious at the application level, but even exists in the context of operating systems. David Chisnall takes a break from UNIX-derivatives and explores some of the more esoteric options." Note: From experience, I can say that the author's claim that "Haiku is more or less ready for their 1.0 release in terms of features" is a bit overambitious.