Monthly Archive:: April 2008

Nokia will introduce Qt to the maemo platform in addition to GTK+. The first actual step will be the distribution of the Qt libraries for application development in maemo.org during 4Q2008. Nokia wants to explore cross-platform possibilities between S60 and maemo. It is interesting also to check the interest in the developer community for Qt in the tablets. This is also a way to attract more attention from the KDE community, a sensible move especially if the Trolltech acquisition gets completed.

Every now and then, the Haiku mailing lists explode with emails about something called the distribution guidelines. The Haiku guys set up a set of guidelines with regards to use of the Haiku trademarks and logos; the "Haiku" name may not be used in the distribution's name, official trademarks and logos must be excluded, but the Haiku icons and artwork may be used. In addition to these cosmetic and trademark issues, the guidelines explain what is needed in order to receive the official "Haiku compatible" logo.

Lennart Poettering of Red Hat, PulseAudio maintainer has blogged in detail about the impact of Real-Time Group scheduling in 2.6.25 kernel. The Real time patches come from -rt patchset maintained by Ingo Molnar of Red Hat which aims to make Linux the first general purpose operating system with hard real time features.

aDesigner is "a disability simulator that helps designers ensure that their content and applications are accessible and usable by the visually impaired. The new version adds support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Flash content; presentation simulation function for ODF documents." Ever since the first graphic designers started to try to bend HTML to their will, people have complained that many web sites subvert the standards that early web architects designed to make navigating easier for the visually impaired. Read more for more discussion...

Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft's mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.

iTWire interviews the newly-elected Debian Project Leader, Steve McIntyre. "A few days back, the project concluded its elections for the year and Steve McIntyre emerged as the victor in a three-cornered contest. McIntyre may well be the most watched elected official of a non-profit group - the direction the project takes is of vital concern to a great many businesses."

A Geeks.com article examines the latest in virtualization technology, and the hypervisor, a hardware execution layer contained in modern processors from AMD and Intel.

When Vista was released, and the first reviews started to trickle in, it became apparent that Vista was a massive release - not only in terms of money spent on it by Microsoft and the amount of promotion, but also the operating system itself. It was huge, and it felt as such too. Despite what many have been saying the past year, Vista is, in fact, much more than just XP with a new theme. Basically every framework and feature has been rewritten, lots of new ones have been added, and, according to some, the process of modularisation has started with Vista (and Server 2008). It may come as no surprise that all these changes resulted in a whole boatload of bugs and breakage, which led many people to conclude that Vista was simply not as "done" as it should have been when released. Steve Ballmer confirmed these sentiments in a speech at Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals conference in Seattle.

Novell's Nat Friedman told InternetNews.com: "The basic concept here is that the standalone operating system is dead." Friedman is Novell's Chief Technology Officer. He added: "The days in which people buy operating systems on their own and then build a stack from there will look like home-built automobiles in the future - people aren't going to do this anymore." This is not the first time some big company predicts the end of the traditional operating system.

Back in September 2003, when Red Hat discontinued its home-oriented Red Hat Linux desktop and offloaded that market to the community-driven but Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, many people were left wondering if Red Hat would ever again offer a product aimed at home desktops. We have the answer now.

Linus Torvalds has released version 2.6.25 of the Linux kernel. "It's been long promised, but there it is now. Special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before."

Microsoft has laid out a new roadmap for the development of Windows Embedded at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2008. The Embedded roadmap outlines the "renaming of its family of products and plans for new solutions in key device categories". Kevin Dallaes, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business, explains: "With today's strategic road map announcement, our aim is to present the evolving Windows Embedded product family in an intuitive fashion, making it easier for our customers to choose the right platforms and tools for their needs."

After a long gap and lots of things happening behind the scenes, the BeleniX team is pleased to announce the availability of BeleniX 0.7, an OpenSolaris-based community distribution. This release marks a considerable change in the evolution of BeleniX. Read on for the details.

LWN reports: When kernel developers talk about problematic hardware vendors, Atheros often appears near the top of their lists. So this announcement from Luis Rodriguez, a developer of the reverse-engineered ath5k driver, is intriguing: "I write to you to inform you that I have decided to join Atheros as a full time employee, as a Software Engineer, to help them with their goals and mission to get every device of Atheros supported upstream in the Linux kernel." What will come of this remains to be seen, but if it truly signals a change of heart at Atheros, it is a most welcome development.