Monthly Archive:: January 2008

"When Steve Jobs announced Apples transition to Intel's x86 processor line, a huge stir occurred among some Mac OS X users who depend on 'Classic' the OS9 environment in Mac OS X for their day to day Mac usage, as Mac OS X on Intel means no more 'Classic' and they were right. Rosetta allows PowerPC applications to run on x86 through JIT (Just In Time) architecture emulation, but its translation is not on a low enough level within OS X to allow 'Classic' to work on x86 and as such those among us who use OS9 applications have been left out in the cold. Until now that is: a project called 'Sheep Shaver' was created to allow BeOS on PowerPC emulate the PowerPC architecture to run another PowerPC operating system on top of BeOS. This application was ported to Mac OS X with the demise of Be Inc. and has since been ported to Mac OS X on Intel processors."

Lenovo is undertaking an Olympic-size effort to establish itself as a consumer PC brand. The Chinese PC maker has found great success with the iconic ThinkPad brand of commercial laptops, a business it purchased from IBM. And now it's taking the world stage with a new line of consumer-focused notebooks called IdeaPad. There will also be a desktop line called IdeaCentre.

I don't usually do stories like this one, but I love this design so much I wanted to share it with you. "Dell has flaunted this gorgeous monitor for a while in various trade shows and press events, always saying that it's just a design concept and not available yet. That all changes now, because the 22-inch Dell Crystal LCD display is suddenly a real product. Just in time for CES, this beauty is set to ship in the next few days, and even though its spec list isn't as high-end as we had hoped, it's still so pretty, if it were smaller we'd want to wear it as a necklace." On a related note, Dell machines are appearing at Best Buy.

The IcedTea project added a PowerPC Java port (both 32 and 64 bit) of OpenJDK. IcedTea 1.5 now also tracks the mercurial repo, provides better GNU/Linux integration by using standard system libraries (libpng, libjpeg, zlib, giflib) and can be bootstrapped with the free gcj/ecj/classpath toolchain. OpenJDK just accepted a new porters group and Gary Benson wrote a guide to porting IcedTea that might be the start of a lot of other Java ports.

FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks."

Version 0.2.0 of the Exclaim operating system has been released. "Exclaim is a project aiming to create a lightweight, simple and easy to use operating system from scratch, with POSIX-compliance to allow existing UNIX applications to run on it. It is intended to be suitable to run on old hardware while still being usable at a reasonable speed. The 0.2.0 release supports reading from ATA hard disks and Ext2 filesystems, and includes a simple shell plus a few other programs."

SharpOS 0.0.1 has been released. "The SharpOS project is aimed at writing an operating system in 100% C#. This originally proved to be a problem of nearly philosophical proportions because C# is a managed language, and by nature isn’t designed for such low-level uses as developing an operating system kernel. Please note that although our goal is to create an operating system in C#, the infrastructure we have created allows kernels to be written in any language that targets the Common Intermediate Language bytecodes and exposes pointers and unsafe code."

From all of us at OSNews, we'd like to wish you a happy and healthy new year. In honor of the new year, we'd like to ask you: what headlines do you expect to read in the tech world in 2008? Are you expecting iPhone rev2? Or maybe Vista SP1's success? Perhaps Hardy Heron's world domination? Will Google's Android swallow the cellphone market? Can Facebook continue to rule the roost in social networking? Tell us what you expect in the comments!