Monthly Archive:: August 2007

"With the latest release of Apple's office productivity suite, iWork '08, the Pages application moves into the ranks of full-fledged word processing applications. Previously known more for its page layout capabilities than for its word processing capabilities, Pages now enables users to switch seamlessly between writing and designing documents. In addition, the application offers 140 document templates and a snazzy track-changes feature, both of which work to position iWork '08 as an apt rival to Microsoft's Office 2004 for Mac in the OS X-compatible office productivity arena."

The KDE project has delayed the release of KDE 4.0 by two months. "We, The Release Team, hereby announce that we are extending the KDE 4.0.0 schedule 2 months by inserting an extra 2 Betas, as follows: September 24: Beta3. October 22: Beta4. November 19: Total Release Freeze. November 21: RC1. December 5: RC2. December 20: 4.0.0 tagged. We feel that there are crucial elements of the release that need more development time. The feature freeze (less exemptions) remains in effect."

GNOME 2.20.0 beta 2 (2.19.91) has been released. "This is our eighth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. All new features should all be there, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

The latest issue of the FreeBSD newsletter contains a letter from the Vice President of the FreeBSD Foundation about the GPLv3. "On June 29th, the Free Software Foundation unveiled version 3 of the GNU General Public license. Even though the majority of software included in the FreeBSD distribution is not covered by any version of the GPL, our community cannot ignore this very popular license or its most recent incarnation. Through extremely successful evangelization, and the popularity of Linux, the misconception that OpenSource and the GPL are synonymous has become pervasive."

This article is an answer to "Competition Is Not Good" by Kroc and reading it wouldn't be comfortable without switching to and from the original article. I wrote it just because I do strongly disagree with Kroc and I believe I can prove that he is not as close to truth as it may seem from the first glance.

During the many threads discussing Ingo Molnar's recently merged Completely Fair Scheduler, Roman Zippel has repeatedly questioned the complexity of the new process scheduler. In a recent posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list he offered a simpler scheduler named the 'Really Fair Scheduler' saying, "as I already tried to explain previously CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity. This patch should now make it clearer, why I could so easily skip over Ingo's long explanation of all the tricks CFS uses to keep the computational overhead low - I simply don't need them."

Ending months of rumors, Hewlett-Packard appears to have released its first mass-market PC with pre-installed Linux. Specifically, the company will soon be selling RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Desktop 5 on its HP dx2250 PC to Australian customers. HP, long a staunch Linux supporter both on the desktop and the server, had never offered a pre-loaded desktop Linux. There have, however, been many rumors in recent months that HP was on the verge of announcing a business Linux desktop with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 1, Ubuntu 7.04, or RHEL Desktop 5, or its delayed desktop Linux brother, Red Hat Global Desktop.

"It's hard to pin down what exactly the Penny Arcade Expo is. The point isn't to sell anything, although you can buy a lot of games and gaming-related merchandise at the show. The point isn't to hype games that are coming out, although this year many developers and publishers were on hand to do just that. The point isn't to organize tournaments or to win anything, although there were tournaments and many prizes. This year, PAX boasted over 19,000 people in preregistrations alone, and the show outgrew its old home at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, instead taking over the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle."

"The first service pack for Windows Vista is slated for release to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008. The announcement was made via Microsoft’s Windows Window Vista Blog by Nick White, a product manager at Microsoft. We got a chance to sit down with White to talk about SP1."

"Discover why you need to change your applications and build environments that supply 32-bit-only kernel extensions to accommodate IBM AIX Version 6. With AIX Version 6, the kernel environment is 64-bit kernel only. Previously, the AIX operating system provided both 32-bit and 64-bit kernels, requiring 32-bit and 64-bit kernel extensions. In this article, apply two easy solutions to help you make the transition and start reaping the benefits of the simplified kernel environment."

"Microsoft partners think it's great that the vendor has been aggressively battling software piracy. But some partners say the task of ensuring that their clients are in compliance with Microsoft's Byzantine software licensing structure is steadily growing more difficult. Making matters worse, several sources told CMP Channel that Microsoft sometimes expects partners to act as foot soldiers in its ongoing campaign against so-called 'unintentional' software piracy by reporting organizations that aren't in compliance, which is threatening their role as trusted advisors to their clients."

"Scheduled for release tomorrow is X.Org 7.3. Among the new features for X.Org 7.3 include the Xorg server 1.4, an application for adjusting a display's backlight, updated display drivers, and support for font catalog directories. Version 1.4 of the X.Org server contains such features as RandR 1.2 support, input hot-plugging, KDrive enhancements, Solaris DTrace support, and EXA improvements. In this article today, we will briefly go over some of the changes found in X.Org 7.3 and we will follow up with some benchmarks in early September."

"Ubuntu Xorg maintainer Bryce Harrington recently demonstrated the BulletProof-X feature that is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 7.10. BulletProof-X provides a failsafe mode which will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line."

Microsoft has delayed the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008. "Windows Server 2008, which we have been saying would Release to Manufacturing by the end of the calendar year, is now slated to RTM in the first quarter of calendar year 2008. Why? Well, as you know, Microsoft's first priority is to deliver a great product to our customers and partners, and while we're very happy with the feedback we're getting and the overall quality of the latest product builds, we would rather spend a little more time to meet the high quality bar that our customers and partners deserve and expect."