Oracle and SUN Archive

"Xandros Desktop Home Premium Edition is the most complete desktop GNU/Linux distribution on the market today, but it still has a few holes in it. If you want to play commercial DVD movies, use an unsupported wireless network card, watch WMV video clips, or install software that isn't in Xandros Networks, the default install will not be sufficient. This guide will show you how to add all of these capabilities to your Xandros Desktop Home Edition 4.0 installation."

Sun is coming out with the latest of its Opteron-based Galaxy servers, including its first system that will give the hardware maker a presence in the fastest growing and highly competitive blade space. At an event in San Francisco July 11, Sun officials will introduce not only the new Sun Blade 8000, but also another server that can scale to 16 processors and a system code-named Thumper that combines both server and storage capabilities in a single box. There's even a slideshow.

The newly released Xandros Desktop Linux 4.0 is one of the few remaining for-pay Linux distributions on the consumer market. The Home Edition is available for $40, or $80 for a Premium Edition. What do you get for your hard-earned cash? Let's take a look.

Xandros has announced the immediate availability of Xandros Desktop 4. You can get the two different version from their online store. A set of screenshots is also available. "Xandros Desktop Home Edition and Xandros Desktop Home Edition - Premium provide a complete media experience on the secure, stable Xandros Linux operating system. The new products cover the digital home lifestyle spectrum with music management, wireless networking, photo management, Internet calling, DVD burning, iPod support, and more." Update: More screenshots.

"In this third in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interviewed Erwin Tenhumberg, Sun's Product Marketing Manager, Client Systems Group. This series of interviews, and the other activities I have planned to follow, are intended to illustrate the rich environment of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument Format specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC."

Sun Microsystems will fire up to 5000 workers this year, as the company tries to cut costs and make it easier to post quarterly profits. All told, Sun expects to cleave off between 11 per cent and 13 per cent of its 37500 person workforce. The firings mark the first mass layoff to take place under new CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has historically been reluctant to let go of staff, despite Wall Street's constant calls to trim costs via layoffs. CNet has more.

FreeSoftwareMagazine reviews the Sun Ultra 3 mobile workstation, and concludes: "As a portable development unit it is a dream. The ability to effectively run both a client and a deployment environment on the same machine at reasonable speeds certainly makes a difference to your ability to work while mobile. The size of the display and the speed of the unit make it ideal for working with multiple source files, or within environments like Sun Studio or Eclipse, both of which ran perfectly. The binary compatibility is obviously key for those who need a portable SPARC unit, but I could just as easily see it being used as a Java or script based development platform."

"Linux distributor Novell has taken a shot at open-source rival Sun, saying the company's moves to open the code on its Solaris operating system had added little to the open-source community." A Sun employee responds: "I can't see how OpenSolaris creates any forks from any of the open source efforts and really does help many folks that do use it. Freedom is the ability to have choice, in addition to removing the restrictions of licenses. OpenSolaris accomplishes both, and works to become "true to the spirit".

Sun Microsystems announced Monday that its longtime chief executive Scott McNealy is stepping down from the helm and will be succeeded by the struggling computer and software company's No. 2 executive, Jonathan Schwartz. McNealy, 51, a Silicon Valley luminary for years, will continue as chairman of the company he co-founded in 1982. Schwartz, 40, will keep the title of president.

Sun Microsystems has begun selling a lower-end server using the UltraSparc T1 'Niagara' processor and has passed an important milestone in the development of the chip's successor. Its Niagara II, now officially named UltraSparc T2, is due to arrive in servers in the second half of 2007, and a higher-end cousin code-named Rock is due to arrive in servers in 2008.

"In what must have seemed to many as a bold move, Sun Microsystems last week announced that it would released the source code for its UltraSparc T1 processor under the GPL, supported by a new organization that it calls OpenSPARC.net. But to those that have been around for a while, the announcement had an eerily familiar sound to it, and that sound was the echo of an organization called SPARC International. Formed 18 years ago to license the SPARC chip design to multiple vendors to ensure second sourcing for the hardware vendors that Sun hoped would adopt it, SPARC International seemed to be every bit as revolutionary for its time as Sun's new initiative does today. SPARC International's site, looking very retro and neglected, can still be seen - at least for now."

Anandtech reviews Sun's T2000 Coolthreads server, and concludes: "At first sight, Sun has won the performance/watt battle for now, but it cannot rest on its laurels. Low voltage versions of the Xeon 'Woodcrest' and Opteron might be able to come very close to the performance/Watt levels that the T1 offers. We also can't shake the feeling that the number of applications, which will really exhibit the kind of exceptional performance that Sun's own heavily optimised benchmarks show, will be quite limited. Last, but certainly not least, Sun's solid engineering has impressed us. Sun's meticulous attention to detail resulted in a sturdy, well-polished machine." More benchmarks here.

A month after releasing the architecture specifications and hypervisor APIs for its UltraSPARC T1 processor to the open-source community, Sun is putting out more information on the chip. Sun on March 21 will publish the hardware design for the T1 - formerly codenamed Niagara - and the Solaris operating system simulation specifications for the chip. The move is the latest in the company's OpenSPARC project, designed to enable hardware and software developers to build atop the new chip's architecture. The goal is to build an ecosystem around the processor that will expand the reach of the SPARC platform. In addition, Sun's grid will finally launch this week.

More details are available concerning the successor of Sun's UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) processor. The Rock processor - due out in 2008 - will have four cores or 16 cores, depending on how you slice the product. By that, we mean that Sun has divided the Rock CPU into four, separate cores each with four processing engines. Each core also has four FGUs (floating point/graphics units). Each processing engine will be able to crank two threads giving you - 4x4x2 - 32 threads per chip.