Monthly Archive:: July 2007

"Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft's chief operating officer, Kevin Turner, announced that Windows Server 2008 (previously known as Longhorn), Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 will be officially launched on February 27, 2008. This may come as a surprise to those following the Windows 2008 Server news closely, since most sources at Microsoft have been insisting that the next version of its server operating system will released at the very end of 2007. Apparently in Redmond there is a difference between releasing the OS and the extravagant product launches, which are more of a pep rally for the product then a technical presentation."

"'Siag, it sucks less!' This is the slogan for Siag Office. This and the self-effacing name for the Siag Office Word Processor, Pathetic Writer, might leave you thinking that this office suite is a mere plaything, a university student's cobbled-together programming assignment. But don't be fooled by first impressions. Siag Office is a lightweight suite of applications which might be just the right set of office tools for you, especially if you have older hardware."

After the technical specifications were mostly finalized recently, a new page has been created on the Mandriva Wiki which gives a guide to the most interesting user-facing features that will be included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including the latest GNOME, KDE and kernel releases, Compiz Fusion, a new network management tool and more. Also available are the more in-depth technical specifications, and the development schedule providing the targeted dates for the various development releases and the final release.

The Linux kernel process scheduler, as you know it, has been completely ripped out and replaced with a completely new one called Completely Fair Scheduler. How fair it will be, remains to be seen. Here's what its original creator Ingo Molnar says: "80% Of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware." Learn more about the new scheduler from the CFS design document.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and June 2007. Again an exciting quarter for FreeBSD. In May we saw one of the biggest developers summits to date at BSDCan , our 25 Google Summer of Code students started working on their projects - progress reports are available in this report, and finally the 7.0 release cycle was started three weeks ago."

"Now that Microsoft has declared itself untouched by any GPLv3 terms, everyone is trying to figure out if they have a leg to stand on. There is a whole lot of analysis going on, with some wondering if Microsoft is a distributor of software under GPLv3 by means of the voucher distribution and others wondering just what those vouchers included."

"Spending too much time organising your windows instead of getting things done? Tiling window managers aim to handle the layout for you. In this article, I'll show how to configure Ion 3 to work with ROX. The basic idea of a tiling window manager is to use all of the screen space for windows, without gaps or overlapping. So, if you have two windows side-by-side and you make one of them a bit bigger, the other one shrinks to make room. I often have several source files open, plus a couple of terminals and maybe a log viewer, so I started looking for something to make things a bit slicker."

Dell is getting ready to launch systems with Ubuntu Linux, but is not yet releasing details of the final specifications. However, the company did say on Friday that as well as a consumer version of Ubuntu, it had plans to launch a small-business version 'in the future'. After some confusion over Dell's Linux strategy, the company said it felt the need to clarify things. "I wanted to be clear that Dell does have plans to offer Linux to more consumers in additional locations outside the United States," said Dell's Lionel Menchaca, digital media manager.

"Intel and VMware announced today that Intel Capital is taking a USD 218.5 million stake in virtualization company VMWare. Intel will purchase 9.5 million Class A shares at USD 23 per share, which, at the completion of VMware's forthcoming IPO, will give Intel about a 2.5 percent stake in the company. Because VMware's stock is split between Class A shares, which have less voting power, and Class B shares, Intel won't control that many votes in the company, but they will get a board seat."

"After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba. The GPLv3 is the updated version of the GPLv2 license under which Samba is currently distributed. It has been updated to improve compatibility with other licenses and to make it easier to adopt internationally, and is an improved version of the license to better suit the needs of Free Software in the 21st Century. To allow people to distinguish which Samba version is released with the new GPLv3 license, we are updating our next version release number. The next planned version release was to be 3.0.26, this will now be renumbered so the GPLv3 version release will be 3.2.0. To be clear, all versions of Samba numbered 3.2 and later will be under the GPLv3, all versions of Samba numbered 3.0.x and before remain under the GPLv2."

"Joel Spolsky in his article 'Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering' compares Microsoft and Apple ways of text rendering and explains why windows people don't like Safari. Text in Safari looks too blurry and that must be why. I want to go further and sum up my experience and observations about it. I'm not an expert in digital typography, but I 'have something to say'. At least, some ideas may be useful for the GNU/Linux community."

Linus has announced the release of the 2.6.22 kernel. Much has happened in this development cycle, including the addition of the mac80211 (formerly 'Devicescape') wireless networking stack, the eventfd system calls, some new TCP congestion control algorithms, a rewritten CFQ I/O scheduler, a new IEEE1934 (Firewire) stack, support for the Blackfin architecture, the long-awaited IVTV TV tuner driver, and much more. See the KernelNewbies 2.6.22 page for vast amounts of detail, the long-format changelog for even more detail, or the short-form changelog for a (relatively) concise listing of patches in this release.

Version 5.0.2 of Yellow Dog Linux was recently released. It includes kernel 2.6.22rc4, SDK v2.0 for Cell BE, more than 70 bug fixes and updates, continued support for both 32- and 64-bit systems and has beta IBM 'System p' support.

The third release candidate for Ion3 has been released. "This third 'rc' release again simply fixes some minor problems in the previous release." Get it from the download page. Ion is a tiling tabbed window manager designed with keyboard users in mind.