Linus Merges XFS on Kernel 2.5.36

General Development 14 Comments
From LWN: "Linus has just merged the XFS filesystem into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in the 2.5.36 kernel. XFS is a high-performance, journaling filesystem from SGI; it now becomes the fourth journaling filesystem (alongside ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS) supported by the Linux kernel. (Other stuff which has been merged, so far, for 2.5.36 includes an IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") update, the next big set of IDE patches, the "huge page" patch for i386 systems, and a number of other tweaks)."
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Sun to Shed Light on Desktop Linux Plans

Oracle and SUN 15 Comments
"Sun is expected to unveil a Frankenstein-like desktop Linux strategy this week, combining various software elements developed in-house or by open-source community projects and third-party vendors. Sun's desktop Linux play, which will be spelled out Wednesday at the start of its SunNetwork conference here, marks another shift for the Santa Clara, Calif., company as its battles industry leader Microsoft for the hearts and minds of corporate users." Read the rest of the article at InfoWorld.
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alphaWorks releases PortingManager tool for Linux

  Submitted by Sam IBM 1 Comment
PortingManager is a free tool that provides assistance when porting C and C++ Solaris applications to zSeries Linux. PortingManager scans a source code tree, looks for Solaris APIs, flags them, and provides documentation that is useful when porting the API from a Solaris-specific function call to an equivalent Linux function call.
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HP, Intel, and Red Hat Launch “Advanced Workstation”

Red Hat 6 Comments
Hewlett Packard has begun to sell Intel Itanium 2-based workstations running Red Hat Linux Advanced Workstation. Advanced Workstation is the desktop companion to Red Hat's Enterprise-oriented Advanced Server. HP also sells versions of these workstations running HP-UX, and will probably sell Windows versions eventually, following a future OS release my Microsoft. This is yet more evidence that Red Hat sees some opportunity for Linux on the corporate desktop, at least in the engineering workstation area, where high-priced Unix workstations have traditionally ruled but have been pushed out by NT/2000-on-Intel in recent years. Read more about it at Silicon.com.
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Gentoo Linux 1.4-RC1 Official; More Specific CPU Optimizations

  Submitted by Daniel Robbins Gentoo 27 Comments
From the official note: The Gentoo Linux 1.4 release candidate 1 is gcc 3.2-based, supporting optimizations for Pentium III, Pentium 4, Athlon (Classic through XP,) K6 (Classic through K6-3,) PowerPC G3 and PowerPC G4 with AltiVec. Also included is a new 2.4.19-based high-peformance kernel with IBM EVMS (enterprise volume management) support, countless enhancements to Portage and a new "live" bootable CD that boots directly into a runtime version of Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc1. Includes KDE 3.0.3, KDE 3.1-beta1, KOffice 1.2, OpenOffice 1.0.1, GNOME 2.0.1 (2.0.2 on the way) and Mozilla 1.0 (1.1 available for testing). The "rc1" release includes bootable CD ISOs for x86, stage tarballs for PPC and Sparc64 (ISOs on their way) and new Alpha Processor stage1 support. Update: Unreal Tournament 2003 Gentoo CD! Read on.
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Microsoft Versus Java: The Next Frontier

Rumors 28 Comments
"The struggle between Microsoft and Java advocates for the hearts and minds of application developers is moving to its next battlefield--and this is a phase in which the number of installed licenses could eventually outnumber everything else to date by an order or magnitude. In the rounds fought so far, Microsoft comfortably repulsed Java's aspirations to displace it on the desktop (at least for now). The struggle for the server looks likely to be an uneasy standoff between entrenched .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition camps. But on mobile devices, everything is still in play. The battle to be the platform of choice across this wide range of devices has barely begun, but it already looks like the primary candidates to cover a large portion of the space will be Microsoft .Net Compact Framework and Java 2 Micro Edition." Read more at InformationWeek.
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Successfully Using LindowsOS

  Submitted by Alan Gilman Linspire 40 Comments
OSNews reader Alan Gilman writes: "I have made a one page website with information about the Linux alternative to Windows known as LindowsOS. Not really for die-hard Linux Geeks, but if you are using Windows and thinking about switching to Linux, LindowsOS makes the job real easy."
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Red Hat Desktop Team Explains The ‘Nullification’ of Gnome & KDE

  Submitted by Cesar Cardoso Red Hat 86 Comments
"We see the desktop as only a piece of the entire operating system product; integration must extend beyond the desktop. We also believe that users care most about functionality and integration rather than the underlying technology. For these reasons, we have created a single desktop look and feel for Red Hat Linux rather than maintaining two unrelated configurations." Very good stuff over there from Owen Taylor, the Red Hat Desktop Team member.
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Objective-C: the More Flexible C++

General Development 64 Comments
"It is a surprising fact that anyone studying GNUstep or the Cocoa Framework will notice they are nearly identical to the NEXTSTEP APIs that were defined ten years ago. A decade is an eternity in the software industry. If the framework (and its programming language--Objective C) came through untouched these past ten years, there must be something special about it. And Objective-C has done more than survive; some famous games including Quake and NuclearStrike were developed using Objective-C." Read the introduction to Objective-C at LinuxJournal.
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GNOME 2.0.2 Desktop and Developer Platform Released

Gnome 12 Comments
The GNOME Project announced today the immediate availability of the GNOME 2.0.2 Desktop and Developer Platform! The GNOME 2.0.x Desktop and Developer Platform releases are devoted to bugfixes, translations, user interface consistency, and general polish of our major 2.0 release. In GNOME 2.0.2, you'll see the results of continued performance and stability work, plus plenty of bug fixes: 318 total GNOME2 bugs marked fixed since the last release (including fixes on other branches).
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SuSE Presents the YaST2 Package Manager

SuSE, openSUSE 110 Comments
From SuSE Linux 8.1 on, YaST2 comes with a new, powerful package manager. It supersedes the classic YaST2 single package selection and integrates the YaST Online Update (YOU) and post-installation add-on selection at the same time. It lays the foundation for supporting multiple installation sources like a traditional set of SuSE CDs, add-on product CDs, patch CDs, FTP servers or even local directories - all of which may contain software packages to install. Specially optimized versions were implemented for both graphical user interface (the YaST2 Qt UI) or text interface (the YaST2 NCurses UI), providing each type of user with the tool that best fits his needs. Read more for the commentary.
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Could Macs Mean Business at Last?

Apple 74 Comments
"Apple's Switch campaign to woo Windows users to its own operating system OS X has been running in high gear lately. Apple also recently issued a major "dot-level" upgrade to OS X called Jaguar, in what some industry followers consider to be a catch-up move to many of the features found in Windows XP. If you ask me, OS X could stand a better chance of challenging Windows on the desktop than Linux does, or ever did." Read the editorial at TechUpdate.
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