Monthly Archive:: September 2008

Reason Online, the online presence of libertarian political magazine Reason, is featuring a book review of Cory Doctorow's book, Little Brother. Little Brother re-imagines George Orwell's classic, dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a modern cyberpunk thriller for a young adult audience.

The GNOME project has released GNOME 2.24 today. In case you're new here: "GNOME 2.24 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment for your computer. GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first class internationalisation and accessibility support. GNOME is Free and Open Source Software and provides all of the common tools computer users expect of a modern computing environment, such as e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia and games. Furthermore, GNOME provides a flexible and powerful platform for software developers, both on the desktop and in mobile applications." GNOME 2.24 comes packed with changes.

After months of anticipation T-Mobile and Google have unveiled the G1, the first commercially available handheld to run Google's Linux-based Android mobile operating system. The smartphone, made by HTC, will be available on Oct. 22. The G1 will support 3G, EDGE and WiFi, includes a wide touchscreen besides of a slideout QWERTY keyboard, a 3-megapixel camera, a music player and applications like Google Maps with Street View. More applications are expected soon, developed by the community.In response to Android's entry into the market, the leading cell phone maker Nokia is planning on freeing and making its Symbian platform royalty-free too. Nokia's David Rivas, head of technology management at Nokia's S60 business sees little future for the practice of billing handset vendors for each phone sold with a particular operating system.

It's been a hell of a time getting X.Org 7.4 out the door, but this afternoon Adam Jackson has released this long-delayed update to this X system. X.Org 7.4 is arriving after the release of X Server 1.5.1 earlier in the day. Yes, it's finally here! In this article we have information on the features that make up this release along with what it's taken to get X.Org 7.4 primed for release.

Logan Harbaugh examines five products for ensuring high availability and performing disaster recovery in complex virtual environments. 'HADR is fraught with complexity, due to the intricacies of virtualization itself,' Harbaugh writes. 'Just as there is no single solution for HADR in general, there is no single solution within virtualization: Different products address different areas, including backups, failover, deployment, and storage virtualization.' Harbaugh's comprehensive article helps sort out the complexities of achieving 'always-on virtualization.'

Cisco and a group of leading tech companies have formed an industry alliance that promotes the Internet Protocol (IP) for interconnecting millions of embedded devices such as thermometers and light switches, forming an "Internet of Things". Many OSNews readers should be familiar with the technical basis of the alliance: embedded open source developer Adam Dunkels' lightweight uIP TCP/IP stack from the Contiki operating system. Nice to see that open source OSes besides Linux and BSD also have a major impact on the technology industry.

According to Microsoft beat writer Mary Jo Foley, word is that "Windows 7's mail, photo-management and movie-maker subsystems applets are all being replaced by optionally installable Windows Live equivalents." To many, replacing subsystems with services is a good thing. But what will the self-professed geeks think? Cnet seems to think that "Windows 7 must appeal to geeks--or else!"

AmigaOS 4.1, which recently finally got a whole lot more accessible, has been reviewed by Ars Technica's Jeremy Reimer. "Long after most people had given it up for dead, companies such as Hyperion Entertainment Inc. are hard at work improving and enhancing the operating system. I had a change to look at a preview copy of the latest release, AmigaOS 4.1, and it is an impressive piece of work." Hardware 3D compositing, memory protection, virtual memory, a modern browser, and performance improvements are among the new features of AmigaOS 4.1. As a sidenote, OSNews will review AmigaOS 4.1 on the Sam440ep in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Palm's planned Linux-based Palm OS, called "Palm OS II," is "on track" to be ready by the end of the year, with a target of early 2009 for devices running the new OS to be on sale. The new Palm OS is being developed independent of Access, the company that owns the current (old) Palm OS, which is acquired with PalmSource in 2005.

Microsoft just released Windows HPC Server 2008, with support for thousands of processors. A NYTimes article takes a closer look at Microsoft's ambitions in supercomputing, and current trends in the HPC field, where Microsoft has almost no current presence. Microsoft's strategy is probably a recognition that with the price of high-powered hardware decreasing, many new companies and organizations are finding application for high-powered systems, and they hope to be able to take a portion of that new business using people's familiarity with the Windows brand as a foot in the door.

OSNews doesn't really do games all that often, but for some, we I make an exception. We're a few days late, but last week PopCap Games, makers of Bejeweled, released its sequel to one of the craziest and most addictive games ever made: Peggle. The sequel is called Peggle Nights, and is basically more of the same. Peggle users around the world, rejoice! Another opportunity to become a Peggle Grand Master!

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code. Update by TH: Rebuttals are appearing all over the web, like this one by Canonical's Matt Zimmerman ("He's refuting a claim which has, quite simply, never been made. When this sort of thing happens on mailing lists, it's called trolling."), or this one by another Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland.

Computerworld chats to Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell. Peyton-Jones speaks in depth about his desire to 'do one thing well', as well as interest in lazy functional programming languages and their place in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters.

After 6 months of development and more than 1000 change sets, the final version of awesome 3.0 has been released. 'awesome' is a frame-work window manager, which also supports tiling window management. This major release brings a lot of new features. The whole configuration file is now write in the Lua language and use a simple API. This allows to modify and control every corner of the window manager. This version is based on XCB, a new low level library which communicate with the X server. Pango usage also enhances text rendering.