Monthly Archive:: February 2008

It works like an Intel chip, but looks like the Cell processor. That's one way of describing the energy-efficient multiple core processors being devised by secretive Montalvo Systems. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has come up with a design for a chip for portable computers and devices that - when finished and manufactured - will theoretically be capable of running the same software as chips from Intel or AMD.

"Apple recently released its second update to OS X 'Leopard', and the latest version of its shiny operating system is now numbered 10.5.2. When I reviewed Leopard two days after its initial release I called it the best operating system ever made for the vast majority of users. I think that's even more true now that 10.5.2 fixes some of the first-release glitches that annoyed me in 10.5 and in Apple's first, quick, bug-fix update 10.5.1."

Jason Perlow takes a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V, and concludes: "Even though Hyper-V is still pre-1.0 code, I think Microsoft has done a bang-up job with its hypervisor, and it may just turn this Linux freak into a Windows 2008 junkie for running his own personal virtualization needs. While VMWare's ESX is still superior on a number of fronts, including its aforementioned VMotion technology and its more powerful cluster management tools, Microsoft has certainly sent a major warning shot across its bow and the bows of the respective Linux vendors, as well."

"Excitement in the Open Graphics community is quite high as it approaches its first production run of the FPGA-based 'Open Graphics Development' board, known as 'OGD1'. It will be available for pre-sale this month with the first units expected to ship soon thereafter. As an insider in this group, I had a unique opportunity to interview several of its members, including: Timothy Miller, the experienced hardware engineer who first started the project (as well as the company, Traversal Technology, which will produce and sell OGP designs), and Patrick McNamara, an interested amateur tinkerer who founded the Open Hardware Foundation."

Having almost disappeared completely late last year, SCO says it has been resuscitated by a new financing plan. Under the terms of the deal, Stephen Norris Capital Partners and "its partners from the Middle East" will supply up to $100 million, enabling SCO to reorganize and launch a new series of products. SNCP will gain a controlling interest in the company, and take it private, allowing it to slip out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Update: As part of the reorganisation, Darl McBride will be let go. Buried in the proposed MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between Unix vendor and Linux litigator SCO and SNCP is the note that "upon the effective date of the Proposed Plan of Reorganization, the existing CEO of the Company, Darl McBride, will resign immediately."

eWeek takes a look at Vista's first service pack. "On the whole, Vista Service Pack 1, which becomes generally available in mid-March, is a fairly staid update with very little in the way of new features or cosmetic changes. SP1 consists of a rollup of Vista's first year of security and bug fixes, new support for a handful of emerging hardware and software standards, and an update to Vista's kernel and core systems that brings the operating system in line with Windows Server 2008, which was also recently released to manufacturing. SP1 also features a handful of performance improvements around file copy operations, which I was able to confirm during my tests in our lab." Concerning the file copy operations, Mark Russinovich has a detailed post about that one.

The fourth pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release brings recognition of other installed distributions during installation, NTFS-3G (with write support) by default for all NTFS partitions, significant improvements to the Mandriva graphical software management tool and more. See here for download information.

"Last year leading up to the release of Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10 we had published several articles looking at various aspects of this desktop Linux distribution. These articles had varied from looking at Ubuntu's power consumption for the past six major releases to presenting the visual history of Ubuntu and how its graphics have evolved since Ubuntu 4.10. With Ubuntu 8.04 shipping in just two months, we are once again looking at Ubuntu from several points of view. In this article, we are looking at Ubuntu's boot performance for the past five releases through the use of Bootchart for measuring its boot time, disk throughput, and the running processes."

"It is much easier to criticize somebody else's work than to create something cool yourself. But if you apply a systematic approach to criticizing, make a numbered list and prepare illustrations, it will be regarded as a fully-fledged analysis! In my opinion, icon design is undergoing a transitional period. On the one hand, screen resolutions are increasing, hence enhancing icons. On the other hand, we still have good old pixels. Icons sized 16x16 and even smaller are still widely used. And so, here are the most commonly observed mistakes in icon design."

The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK using Free Software build tools and provides replacements libraries for the binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project. This release adds the "Zero-assembler" port which will allow IcedTea to run with zero (ok, minimal) porting effort on any GNU/Linux architecture that has a gcc and libffi port available. JNLP support has been added through the addition of NetX, which makes a lot of java webstart applications work out of the box. Check out the screenshots. Gary Benson will give a talk about the zero-assembler port at FOSDEM during the free Java developer meeting where GNU Classpath, OpenJDK and many other Free Java projects come together to plan the future of Free Java on GNU/Linux.

LLVM 2.2 has been released. Wikipedia summarises: "The Low Level Virtual Machine, generally known as LLVM, is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and 'idle-time' optimization of programs written in arbitrary imperative programming languages. The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

The Fedora 8 Xfce Spin has been released. "Fedora Xfce Spin is a bootable Fedora Live CD image available for x86 and x86_64 architecture. It can be optionally installed to hard disk or converted into boot USB images and is ideal for Xfce fans and for users running Fedora on relatively low resource systems. As a additional bonus, this release rolls in updates for Fedora 8 released till yesterday (2008/02/12)."

The annual FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) is coming up at the end of February. This year, as in past years, the FOSDEM crew is publishing interviews with the speakers. The first batch includes interviews with Bill Hoffman, author of CMake, Robin Rowe, project manager of CinePaint, who will be talking about Linux in Hollywood, Kohsuke Kawaguchi from the Hudson project, Stéphane Magnenat, the author of Globulation 2 and Patrick Michaud, who'll be talking about Perl 6. The second batch introduces Steven Knight, who wrote the python-based build system SCons, Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter from the klik project, Matthias Rechenburg, openQRM author, Andrei Zmievski of the PHP project, who will be enlightening the FOSDEM 2008 audience about PHP6 and its Unicode and internationalization features and Mark Finkle (Mozilla Platform Evangelist).

Comc: "Fault".