Monthly Archive:: April 2008

Yankee Group's second annual Server Operating System Reliability survey polled 700 users from 27 countries worldwide. The latest independent, non-sponsored Web-based survey revealed that all versions of UNIX -- which typically carry very high workloads -- are near bulletproof, achieving 99.999% reliability. IBM's AIX UNIX led all server operating systems for reliability with just over 30 minutes of per server annual downtime but Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems also got high scores.

"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007, which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes more than 12 times as much memory and nearly three times as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just seven short years ago, Office 2000. Despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call The Great Moore's Law Compensator (TGMLC). In fact, the hard numbers above represent what is perhaps the first-ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption. In this article I hope to further quantify the impact of TGMLC and to track its effects across four distinct generations of Microsoft's desktop computing software stack."

PreUpgrade is a new feature being developed for Fedora 9. It allows a user to do all the tedious work of a safe Anaconda upgrade in a running system that is still usable. This is the answer to every user who has ever wanted to do a live upgrade with yum, but been worried about the safety of doing this. Fedora 9 will also get kernel modesetting.

"After three weeks of using KDE 4 on my laptop, I continue to find new features and changes. I am aware of the dictionary of special names that make up the back end of the new KDE - Oxygen, Plasma, Phonon, and the rest - but just as often as the major features, it's the little items that I find welcome as much as the large ones. Increasingly, I'm looking at KDE 4 as a statement about what a desktop should be, and contrasting it with my own ideas on the subject."

Linuxseekers reviews Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, and concludes: "In conclusion, there is no doubt that Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is a great release. Great artwork! The hardware support for this release has been excellent with exception of the support for the two of my USB-based TV tuners (Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 900 and the less well-known Compro type)."

Two new software build systems were ported to Syllable Desktop: OMake and CMake. They are available here. Both are cross-platform and both work on a higher level than the classic Make. However, OMake is a Make replacement (with a quite similar syntax, even), whereas CMake works on top of Make by generating traditional Makefiles and other project files. To meet one of Syllable's milestone objectives, and in keeping with the project's strive to reduce complexity and advance the state of the art, OMake was selected as the preferred make system for native Syllable projects. Support for OMake was implemented in Builder, Syllable's module-level build system. OMake itself will be added to a future Developer's Delight SDK. The Syllable system and its applications will migrate to it over time. Ported software will keep using their own internal build systems.