General Development Archive

News.com has published a 2002 in Review piece on the open source segment of the technology industry. Open source had a very good year in 2002, even as (or perhaps because) the rest of the industry suffered financially. Linux made strides in adoption at large companies and saw some major improvements in power and usability, Open Office became usable, Microsoft started to get scared, and Sun finally succumbed to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Most of all, even though scores of small companies went out of business as venture funding from the last millennium finally ran out, Open Source software is still around, and flourishing.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting is coming soon, and in preparation, the organizers have published interviews with some of the participants: David Faure for KDE and Michael Meeks for GNOME.

Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.

"In my previous article, I introduced the C# programming language and explained how it works in the context of the Mono environment, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. I will now go on to some details on the data types supported by the C# programming language." Read the second article at LinuxGazette. Another development article ("Writing Portable Code") is here.

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

Active Data Recovery Software has released the NTFS Reader for DOS, a DOS-interfaced freeware application for reading NTFS volumes from MS-DOS or Windows 9x environments.

In the Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Daniel Robbins shows you how to use the latest filesystem technologies in Linux 2.4. In this conclusion to the AFIG series, Daniel continues his discussion of the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, or EVMS. He shows you how to use evmsn to take a new hard drive, partition it, and create LVM volumes on it. Along the way, he fills you in on important EVMS concepts that you'll find essential as you continue your exploration of this powerful technology.

The GCC 3.2.1 release is to provide a stable platform for OS distributors to use building their next OS releases. A primary objective was to stabilize the C++ ABI.

This is an informative article about the upcoming Reiser4 filesystem. It covers a lot of the performance improvements in Reiser4 along with a lot of ideas about a database filesystem.

Forth has been a recognized programming language since the 1970's. ColorForth is a redesign of this classic language for the 21st century. It also draws upon a 20-year evolution of minimal instruction-set microprocessors. Now implemented on modern PCs, it runs stand-alone without an operating system. Applications are recompiled from source with a simple optimizing compiler.

"It is not as if I am new to Kylix. I am a Delphi programmer since version 1, and I always keep my C++ skills up. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the release of Borland's Kylix 3, the Rapid Application Development environment for Linux that includes both Delphi language and C++ IDE's (integrated development environment). The code produced with Kylix can be recompiled with minimal changes under Microsoft Windows using either Delphi for Windows version 6 or greater, or C++ Builder version 6 or greater." Read the review at NewsForge.

This series of articles is specially written for newbie programmers using Gnome and GNU/Linux. Python, the chosen language for development, avoids the usual overhead of compiled languages like C. Read it at LinuxFocus.org. Previous articles in the series: first article, second article.

Here is a poll we put together to better understand the nature of the OSNews readers. Please tell us about the level of experience you got with programming.

"I suppose it's a losing battle, but it's one worth fighting, anyway. What makes me think of it is a thread I noticed on the freedesktop.org mailing list. In that thread, Andreas Pour, with whom I do not agree about much, defends obvious common sense against what over the last couple of years has been a growing onslaught. He's absolutely right, but that isn't always enough." Read it at LinuxAndMain.