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Sources: Sun Plans to Open Nearly All of Solaris Source Code

Developers and solution providers might get more than they expect when Sun Microsystems details its plans to open-source Solaris later this year. Sources familiar with the company's plans told CRN at JavaOne 2004 that Sun is not going to simply open up bits and pieces of the millions of lines of code in Solaris, Sun's popular Unix-based operating system. The vendor plans to open up nearly all of the OS's source code, including, "all the rocket science," one Sun employee who requested anonymity said.

XP theme engine for DotGNU WinForms; Other .NET-related News

Shortly after the QT theme engine release, DotGNU announces the availability of the XP theme engine for its implementation of WinForms. The new XP engine allows DotGNU WinForms to use literally thousands of custom designed "visual styles", such as those available from ThemeXP.org. Screenshots 1 and 2. On other .NET-related news, Monodevelop 0.5 is released, #develop Fidalgo RC2 was released 3 days ago and wx.NET Beta 2 was released late last week.

KDE Gets Thin Client Technology

A Task Force Team of KDE and Knoppix hackers and enthusiasts created "just in time" for LinuxTag 2004 two programs which harvested an overwhelming response from visitors: FreeNX Server and kNX Client. Although not yet officially released, several presentations showed a well working preview of the KDE version for the speed boosting NX Terminal Server technology. The software will be available soon at Kalyxo.org. Read more here.

Project Looking Glass developer release is out

Sun finally released a preview of Project Looking Glass. Sources are of course included, and it's GPL-ed. Project Looking Glass is/should_be a revolutionary new aproach to the way we interact with the applications, the biggest change to GUI in 20 years. I wonder if 21" is enough, cause having 20 windows folded like the ones in the screen-shots should be a bit troublesome at 'only' 1600x1200.

An Engineer’s Thoughts on Mac OS X Tiger

Let me make it clear. I'm not a fan of Apple. I think that their products are overhyped, overpriced and underperforming. If you're looking for a fair unbiased opinion, you're looking in the wrong place. You've been warned. So, I was at Steve Jobs' 2004 WWDC keynote yesterday, attempting to take pictures for OSNews (an amazingly hard task, by the way, which really explained why people pay big bucks for big lenses equipped with image stabilizers). UPDATE: Stop reading right there, I have rewritten & updated the article here.

Microsoft launches betas of new ‘Express’ lineup

Microsoft has opened public betas for the upcoming Express edition of its Visual Studio product line as well as SQL Server. The products include "Visual Basic 2005 Express", "Visual C# 2005 Express", "Visual C++ 2005 Express", "Visual J# 2005 Express", "SQL Server 2005 Express" and an interesting "Visual Web Dev 2005 Express" for developing ASP.NET content in Visual Basic, C# or J#. The expected retail pricing for these products is $49-$99.

Five Performance Tools for Linux on PowerPC

This article describes Performance Inspector, which contains a suite of performance tools for Linux. The author describes how to download and install the required software and tools, and how to collect performance data. She also provides details on how to use the five basic tools, which you can use to analyze performance of your C/C++ and Java apps, as well as performance of your system as a whole.