Monthly Archive:: July 2008

This preview of the upcoming OpenSolaris 2008.11 release highlights aspects that should be of interest to systems and storage administrators who have to deal with large storage environments. ZFS is a big component that is referred to often, but there are new storage services and capabilities in addition to ZFS that might be overlooked and are quite compelling. Editor's Note: We ran an article yesterday that covered the surface level (eye-candy) improvements of the 2008.11 release of OpenSolaris.

InfoWorld's Curtis Franklin reviews the four leading contenders to supplant Microsoft Office in business and finds that, while Google Docs is not ready to take on the full mantle, OpenOffice and Zoho provide viable alternatives should IT endeavor to wean business off Office.

After a few delays and tons of rumors, Intel's fifth generation notebook platform has arrived. Centrino 2, previously known as Montevina, comes with with it a line of new Core 2 Duo processors, upgraded graphics and Wi-Fi, and DDR3 RAM. One of the first notebooks to be released with Centrino 2 is Lenovo's newest ThinkPad, the X200. This is the update to the X61 which not only had all the new Centrino gear, but moves to a widescreen display.

InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy has been using a converted Windows Server 2008 as his primary OS since hitting a wall using Vista as a Visual Studio development platform four weeks ago. According to Kennedy, the guerrilla 'Workstation' 2008 OS has turned his Dell notebook into a well-oiled machine that never gets sluggish and rarely needs to reboot. Those interested in making the switch should check out win2008workstation.com, a clearinghouse for 'Workstation' 2008 tips and techniques. Kennedy also offers a link to a Windows 2008 Workstation Converter utility for quick conversion.

In an interesting and exciting turn of events, Haiku was able to secure a space at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 by negotiating with LinuxWorld organizers (IDG) and ReactOS who will be sharing the exhibit space with Haiku this year.Average LinuxWorld attendance is more than 10,000 people, and represents a large amount of commercial and media interest. This should provide excellent exposure and opportunities for both projects alike.

Gustav Duarte has written a three part article about the computer boot up process. The series starts with the Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map of an Intel computer and then he covers the processes that take place from the BIOS initialization to the boot loader. The final part is the coverage of the Kernel Boot Process.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Luca Cardelli is a member of the Modula-3 design committee. Cardelli is a Principal Researcher and Head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and is an ACM Fellow. Here he chats to Computerworld about the origins of Modula-3, including how the most exciting Modula-3 design meeting ever, was abruptly interrupted by the San Francisco 7.1 earthquake.

The ext3undel utility can recover accidently removed data on ext3 filesystems. Users can recover a specific file by name, or they can restore all files marked as deleted. ext3undel is a wrapper for other recovery programs such as Photorec, Foremost and SleuthKit.

Apple has filed a suit (more details) on July 3rd against Psystar in the northern district of California. Psystar dubbed its cheap Mac Clone as Open Computer and started shipping them around April of this year.

A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has arrived, aimed at both Linux newbies and content creators. Boasting "out of the box" multimedia codecs, the freely downloadable PC/OS incorporates the lightweight XFCE desktop, and is said to offer a similar layout to the groundbreaking, but ultimately doomed BeOS.

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, start playing around with awk to see how it works and quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

The #1 supercomputer in the world, the IBM Roadrunner, produced at a cost of nearly $100 million dollars, runs Fedora. IBM has been working on and contributing to Fedora, using it as a prototype for the new cell architecture that leads to this supercomputer.

A sizeable number of full featured, mature and free video applications are available on the Linux platform. This article explores such topics as becoming a digital video editing master and turning your Linux machine into a Home Theatre.To provide insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 42 high quality Linux video applications, covering a broad spectrum of uses. Most of the titles included in this feature are desktop applications with an elegant graphical front-end, although we have not neglected console software.

"Linux kernel hacker Greg Kroah Hartman's June 5, 2008 talk at Google titled "The Linux Kernel" was chock-full of details about kernel development". This is a collection of some statistics about the Linux kernel development from that talk. Juicy Bit:"Supports more processors and devices than any other OS in history".