OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

GNOME 2.6.2 Desktop and Developer Platform

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2004-06-28 Gnome 22 Comments

The GNOME 2.6.2 Desktop and Developer Platform has been released: this point release from the stable branch of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform contains a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the previously released 2.6.1 version.

Sun Opens Its 3-D Linux Desktop

Submitted by JiB 2004-06-28 Oracle and SUN 21 Comments

Sun is putting into the hands of the open-source community Project Looking Glass, its next-generation, 3-D Linux desktop system that has been receiving rave reviews.

ReactOS 0.2.3 Released

Submitted by Jason Filby 2004-06-28 ReactOS 8 Comments

This ReactOS release features the new LiveCD image, improved and more stable kernel and win32k kernel graphics subsystem, lots of networking foundation work, improved setup and better bundled explorer, command shell and drivers. Also included is newly ported user DLL code from WINE.

Windows CE 5.0 to Include First OS Commercial Derivatives Program

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-28 Windows 2 Comments

New embedded device software fuels innovation with expanded feature set and additional source code access, Microsoft said. Elsewhere, you can see a Windows CE Feature-By-Feature comparison.

Existing Applications can be Enabled for Grid

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-28 General Development No Comments

Most enablement efforts, for existing code using batch-oriented grid infrastructure software, are similar. There's a pattern you can follow. You can use this pattern to achieve the first three strategies of grid adoption.

New Cinema Displays Announced at WWDC

Kevin05 2004-06-28 Apple 51 Comments

This morning at WWDC Steve Jobs introduced three new Apple Cinema displays. The new 20, 23 and 30-inch displays will use the standard DVI connection instead of Apple's proprietary ADC connection. The 30 inch display, which can run at a resolution up to 2560x1600, will require a special dual link Nvidia card. To read more about what's new at WWDC, head over to MacCentral.

Debunking High Tech Urban Legends

David Adams 2004-06-28 Humor 57 Comments

Will magnets zap your data? Will turning off your PC without shutting down Windows hurt anything? Can hackers really hose your data? Do you really need one of those static wrist straps? PC World answers all of these questions and more. Are there any other myths that you've always wondered about? Post them in the comments!

Is Java Cooling Off?

David Adams 2004-06-28 Java 39 Comments

A ZDNet article notes that Sun's JavaOne conference, starting today, will likely have a more somber mood than the one in 2000, when Java was seemingly ruling the world. Sun is facing a two-front assault by Microsoft and Open Source, and though its Java platform is a bright spot in its business plan, many users are clamoring for Sun to cede more control over its direction or even free the source code. Some major Java vendors like BEA and IBM are bypassing Sun's "Java Community Process" and releasing Java extensions on their own.

EU: Microsoft Will Not Have to Make Windows Changes

David Adams 2004-06-28 Legal 13 Comments

The antitrust penalties that the EU laid down on Microsoft a few months ago will not be implemented until an appeals court has a chance to decide whether the penalties should be suspended for the entire length of the appeal, which is expected to be several years. Had this step not been taken, the penalties would have gone into effect today.

Bill Gates: More Firewalls, Faster Fixes, Auto Update

David Adams 2004-06-28 Privacy, Security 34 Comments

Speaking in Australia, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stressed that more widespread use of firewalls would solve some of the Internet's security problems. He also stressed that his company needs to reduce the frequency with which major security updates are released. He also noted that while most OSes can turn around a security fix in 60-90 days, "we have it down to less than 48 hours." He stressed the importance of using the Window auto-update feature and noted that SP2 defaults the auto-update and firewall to on.

Real Announces Red Hat and SUSE/Novell Deals

Submitted by JiB 2004-06-28 Multimedia, AV 15 Comments

Real will be distributing its RealPlayer 10 for Linux with both Red Hat and Novell/SuSE desktop Linux distributions. In other news, RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X will be out this week.

DragonFly BSD 1.0 Release Candidate 1 Released

Submitted by Jeroen R van der Werven 2004-06-28 BSD & Darwin 12 Comments

Matt Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and more. A final is expected in two weeks.

Microsoft Eases “Shared Source” Restrictions

David Adams 2004-06-28 Microsoft 4 Comments

Microsoft is eliminating many restrictions on the use of the "shared source" license for its Windows CE operating system. Significantly, ror the first time, any developer, anywhere in the world will be allowed to include modified Windows CE code within commercial products without having to sublicense the modifications back to Microsoft. The change, which accompanies the impending full release of Windows CE 5.0, will counter competition from Linux and is likely to expand Microsoft's slice of the roughly $1B embedded OS market pie.

Global Grid Connectivity Using Globus Toolkit With Solaris OE

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-28 Solaris 5 Comments

This article describes how to integrate grid computing with Globus Toolkit software for a site using Sun N1 Grid Engine software (formerly Sun Grid Engine) as a local resource manager.

Working with Objects in Java Programming

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-28 Java 22 Comments

Learn how to deal with objects: creating them, reading their values and changing them, and calling their methods. Also learn how to cast objects from one class to another, cast to and from primitive data types and classes, and take advantage of automatic conversions through autoboxing and unboxing.

EU suspends Microsoft sanctions

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-27 Microsoft 81 Comments

The European Commission has temporarily suspended an order requiring Microsoft to sell a version of Windows without media player software, just before it would have taken effect, a source familiar with the situation said Sunday.

FreeBSD Ports: What To Do When Things Go Wrong

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-27 FreeBSD 25 Comments

Here is an interesting tutorial with suggestions on what to do when things go wrong with FreeBSD.

Java 3D source code now available

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-27 Java 13 Comments

Sun announced the availability of the source code for the Java 3D API on java.net.

Briefly on Software

Submitted by Elver 2004-06-26 Open Source 33 Comments

Peter Johansson, a compsci student at the Chalmers University in Sweden has written an article about the differences of corporations and the Open Source community in today's software world.

Mac OS X Tiger Screenshots?

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-26 macOS 59 Comments

MacRumors claims to have found some screenshots from the upcoming OSX Tiger showing some new features and the ability to "disable" the UI of the parent window if a focused/modal window is on top. They also include a PDF file with installation instructions, in which OSX requires a DVD drive to get installed. Please note that the MacRumors information is unconfirmed and not official by any means. Update: This is most probably fake, read the comments for more opinions on this.