Monthly Archive:: December 2007

Opera, based in Norway, announced Thursday that it had filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, alleging that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by bundling IE with the Windows operating system. Opera also claimed that Microsoft is hindering interoperability by not following accepted open Web standards. Microsoft struck back Friday, indicating that it would not willingly unbundle IE from Windows. "We believe the inclusion of the browser into the operating system benefits consumers, and that consumers and PC manufacturers are already free to choose to use any browsers they wish," a Microsoft representative said. "Internet Explorer has been an integral part of the Windows operating system for over a decade and supports a wide range of Web standards."

Richard Stallman sent a message to OpenBSD-Misc, explaining why he doesn't recommend OpenBSD. "From what I have heard, OpenBSD does not contain non-free software (though I am not sure whether it contains any non-free firmware blobs). However, its ports system does suggest non-free programs, or at least so I was told when I looked for some BSD variant that I could recommend. I therefore exercise my freedom of speech by not including OpenBSD in the list of systems that I recommend to the public." His mail started a huge thread (that's just page 1) and since then he's under a blast of messages from Theo de Raadt and the OpenBSD users. De Raadt replied: "Richard, you are wrong. You said very clearly in your interview that the ports tree contains non-free software. It does not. It is just a scaffold of Makefiles containing URLs, and an occasional patch here or there. You are just plain wrong. And you are not enough of a man to admit that you are wrong. I may be unfriendly at times, but you are a power-misusing hypocritical liar who attacks projects that try harder than any others to only make free software available. Shame on you."

"All promised features were cut from Vista." This is a commonly heard complaint about Windows Vista on the internet. While there certainly is a lot to complain about when it comes to Windows Vista, the mythical 'cancelled features' certainly is not one of them. Let me explain why.

A relatively lengthy Q&A with Ciaran McCreesh about Paludis, the Portage alternative for Gentoo.

The Pegasos book is a free multilanguage ebook dedicated to the Pegasos computer from Genesi/bplan. It is a 223 pages PDF document, splitted in 4 volumes, which contains information about the Pegasos I and II PowerPC computer and all its main supported operating systems. The latest version (V2.3) can now be freely downloaded both in English or in French. Partial older versions are also available in Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian language. Elsewhere, VmwAROS is a pre-configured AROS environment for VMware. New beta 0.5 improves reliability, networking, development and gaming, with more software and bugfixes.

We don't publish lots of camera reviews at OSNews, but sometimes something refreshing and interesting comes out, and we feel the need to report on it. Geeks.com sent us for the purposes of this review the Kodak V1253, a 12 megapixel digicam with a 3.1" screen, that can also record 720p MPEG4-SP video at 30fps. At just $220, this must be one of the cheapest 720p solution in the market.

The Syllable project has published the second version of the Linux-based Syllable Server. A number of fixes were made, most notably to terminal initialisation and printing. GhostScript is included now. Some of the Syllable-specific initialisation scripts are executed now. Many packages were updated, including GLibC, CoreUtils, BASh, ORCA and the printing packages. Several new packages were added. IPTables is included, so Syllable Server can be used to build a firewall. The wireless tools are included for configuring wireless networks. The ALSA userspace library and tools were added to provide full access to the audio system, instead of relying on OSS emulation. All separate binary packages for Server 0.1 are still valid on Server 0.2. On Syllable, binary compatibility is maintained as much as possible.

Kicking off the 2008 Spring development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. Read more at the Mandriva Club.

DistroWatch reviews Geubuntu, and concludes: "For Enlightenment and Ubuntu fans this distro is custom made for you. It takes the best of Ubuntu and combines it with a great desktop environment. If Ubuntu or Kubuntu is a bit too heavy for your equipment, then Geubuntu just might be what you need. It might also be an idea for those who find Elive a bit overwhelming, or those who like to be a bit different from the rest of the crowd."

Ars takes a look at the new RC2 release of KDE 4.0. "Transitions are always hard, but when the dust settles, a clean break between versions and an opportunity to introduce some innovative new ideas should lead to a stronger user experience. After years of development, unnecessary cruft builds up and things tend to get disorganized. The KDE 4 transition, though it will definitely be rocky at first, gives developers the ability to cut away the cruft and reorganize code in a manner that makes the whole environment more future-proof and easier to maintain."

"GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA. Cimitan says that the addition of translucency effects proves that critics of GTK are wrong. "n the last week I've seen a lot of people claiming about 'lacks' of Gtk+ capabilities," wrote Cimitan in a blog entry. "Some of them still think that Gtk+ doesn't have RGBA support... Or it will require nasty hacks. This is absolutely false."

An article series at embedded.com discusses how to choose an operating system for tiny, low-power, memory-constrained wireless embedded devices: "The smart sensors used in wireless industrial and building automation applications are often characterized by energy restrictions, small CPUs, and small memory footprints. The limited resources of the hardware make special applications necessary, which in turn create special requirements for the system software." Part 1, and part 2.

"Microsoft's Hilton Locke, who used to work on the Tablet PC team and now works on the Windows Shell team, let us know today that if we are impressed with touch on the iPhone, then we'll be blown away by the touch features of the upcoming Windows 7." More here.

Symbian's introductory training covers Active Objects. Active Objects are a Symbian specific method of providing co-operative multitasking. During the introduction to Active Objects we are all told about how inefficient and bloated multi threaded applications can be. Each thread requires heap and stack space, it requires kernel resources to provide for the context switching, and time slicing. All of this is an overhead on a device with limited resources. Instead Symbian provide Active Objects. We can have many Active Objects within a single process all waiting on different events. This means that we do not need as many threads, and hence we consume less resources. More here.