OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

New Power Macs Break 1GHz Barrier

Submitted by Olaf van Es 2002-01-28 Apple 32 Comments

"Apple Computer on Monday broke the 1GHz barrier not once but twice with the delivery of new Power Macs. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company unveiled faster Power Macs that analysts and Mac users say could close the "gigahertz gap" with PCs. Apple shipped three new Power Macs, with the top-of-the-line model packing two 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors. The other new models have single 800MHz or 933MHz processors. The company also shipped Nvidia's GeForce 4 MX graphics processor, about a week before the card's scheduled announcement." Read the rest of the report & analysis at ZDNews.

Red Hat’s New Linux Packs a Bigger Punch

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-28 Red Hat 2 Comments

"Red Hat, the top seller of the Linux operating system, will begin offering a higher-end and more specialized version of Linux later this year that won't be as easy to find as the current all-purpose package. Red Hat will demonstrate its coming Advanced Server product this week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York and plans to begin selling it mid-spring, said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at the Durham, N.C., company." Read the rest of the report at ZDNews.

NetBSD Enters the Desktop

Submitted by Robson 2002-01-28 NetBSD 1 Comment

As if the Desktop Linux Revolution weren't enough, Wasabi Systems, Inc. will unveil what is being described as the "first commercial NetBSD boxed set" at LinuxWorld next week. Wasabi's new product is called the "NetBSD 1.5.2 Package Release for Desktops", and "comes ready to install, in a nice friendly box complete with CDs and a manual," said Wasabi founder and CEO Perry Metzger.

The Life and Times of the Multics OS

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-28 OS News 1 Comment

Descriptive quote from the article: "Multics is a mainframe timesharing OS that started as far back as 1965 and was put to rest after a long life in October 2000. You may be asking why you need to know more about an OS that is no longer in use. The answer to that question is, "You'll never know where you're going if you don't know where you've been." Although this saying is a bit corny, it is especially true of Multics because of its influence on today's mainstream operating systems."

Mandrake 8.2 Beta1, RootLinux and CRUX Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-27 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 23 Comments

Mandrake Software released the first beta of their Mandrake 8.2 Linux distribution in two ISO CDs. They include kernel 2.4.17, XFree86 4.2, glibc 2.2.4, Window Maker 0.8, apache 1.3.22, Evolution 1.01, KDE 2.2.2, galeon 1.0, mozilla 0.9.7 and a lot of Mandrake Tools-specific changes & updates (screenshots). In related news, RootLinux released version 1.3pre1 which contains many updates and bugfixes. This release uses CUPS as printing system and PureFTPD as the default FTP daemon. The installation has been improved, and ext3 support was added. It also contains Linux 2.4.17, glibc 2.2.5, KDE 2.2.2, and XFree86 4.2.0. Recently, CRUX 0.9.2 was also released with many new features. Both the CRUX and RootLinux developers were interviewed by OSNews three months ago.

Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4, Part II

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-27 Java 11 Comments

"Dig deeper with us into Sun's enhancements. You can now assert in Java, and you'll like the new logging capabilities. We've got benchmark tests of the new graphics routines, too. Java coders can now do what C programmers have done from the start with new classes for Regular Expressions. Pattern matching is now a piece of cake. Yes, it's still beta, but here's a preview of what's faster--and slower." Read the second part of the interesting Java 1.4 preview at ExtremeTech.

Intel’s C++ Compiler Significantly Faster than GCC

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-26 General Development 27 Comments

"Intel's C++ Compilers for Linux and Windows smoke GNU C and MS Visual C++ in number crunching benchmarks" the article at Open-Magazine suggests. We are not surprised at all, as we already talked about this on OSNews, months ago.

Lindows Sneak Preview Released

Submitted by Dave Merrill 2002-01-26 Linspire 37 Comments

OSNews reader Dave Merrill was lucky to get access to a preview version of the Lindows OS and inform us with his findings. Read more about Dave's mini-preview. In the meantime, NewsForge also published a more extensive preview of the Linux-based OS which aims to run Windows software out of the box without the need of a Windows operating system installed. The NewsForge article also includes three screenshots.

Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4, Part I

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-25 Java 9 Comments

"Sun's Java is locked on the future in this new release With this significant upgrade of the Java standard, Sun directly takes on Microsoft's XP and .NET framework. Whether you're a developer or just a Java enthusiast, you'll need to know what Sun has in store for 2002." Read the interesting preview of the new Java version at ExtremeTech.

Journal File Systems in Linux

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-25 General Development 1 Comment

"First of all, there is no a clear winner, XFS is better in some aspects or cases, ReiserFS in others, and both are better than Ext2 in the sense that they are comparable in performance (again, sometimes faster, sometimes slightly slower) but they a journaling file systems, and you already know what are their advantages... And perhaps the most important moral, is that Linux buffer/cache is really impressive and affected, positively, all the figures of my compilations, copies and random reads and writes. So, I would say, buy memory and go journaled ASAP..." Read the rest of the 8-pages long article.

A .NET Primer for Mac Users

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-25 .NET 8 Comments

"I wrote this after reading a confusing rant called 'Microsoft's .NET & The Advent Of (More) Nuisance Technology' on a site called MacObserver. The mispresentation of .NET in that story concerned me — not because it was negative, but because the author confused .NET with Microsoft's forthcoming web services (then called Hailstorm, now called '.NET My Services'). This is like critisizing MacOSX because you don't like iPhoto." Read the rest of the easy-to-follow presentation of .NET.

Intel Designs a 64bit x86 CPU?

Submitted by Chris Lattner 2002-01-25 Intel 20 Comments

Rumors abound that Intel is designing 64bit extensions to it's Pentium line, in case Itanium turns out to be a flop: "Intel's decision to back the novel Itanium architecture had upset a small group of Intel engineers in Oregon, who preferred to build on the x86 legacy. When AMD released the specifications of its upcoming 64-bit chips in the summer of 2000, these ``cowboy'' engineers decided that Intel needed to match its rival. They began developing their own 64-bit extensions to the Pentium line, making sure the code was compatible with AMD's design." Update: MercuryCenter has an article about this too.

Is There Life Outside Microsoft Office?

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-25 Office 21 Comments

"There are alternatives to the ubiquitous applications suite, but in most cases, they're not worth the trouble. Do you need to have Microsoft Office on your PC? Because Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have become the de facto standards for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it's tough to do any sort of business on a computer without being able to read and edit files in those formats. But if you're willing to make some compromises, there are alternatives." Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek. In a related note, Gobe released a new demo of gobeProductive3.

FreeDOS Ripcord Beta 7 H02 Available

Submitted by Quang Pham 2002-01-25 OS News No Comments

The FreeDOS Ripcord Beta 7 H02 distribution is now available for download. Ripcord distributions are 'semi-official' distributions based on the latest official distribution, but (tries to) contain the latest versions of the available programs.

Torvalds Looks Ahead

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-24 Linux 14 Comments

"As the Linux community prepares to congregate next week in New York for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, the center of attention, as always, will be Linux creator Linus Torvalds. A little more than a year ago Torvalds released the 2.4 kernel and has spent much of the year working on numerous 2.4.x versions to further stabilize and strengthen Linux. After handing the 2.4 kernel over to Marcelo Tosatti to maintain late last year, he turned his attention to the 2.5 development tree. Torvalds took time out to exchange e-mail with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli about his work on and vision for 2.5." Read the interesting Q&A at eWeek.

Some Historical Unices Now Available

Guest post by Ken Crandall 2002-01-24 Unix 5 Comments

Caldera is releasing the source of some of the historical Unices it inherited through its acquisitions, including 16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for the PDP-11 and 32-bit 32V UNIX. However, the more "interesting" UNIX versions, UNIX System III and UNIX System V (and their descendants) are purposely omitted (probably to prevent competition with UNIXWare and OpenServer, or to harvest the relevant technologies from them that Caldera wants to keep in its pocket.) A PDF of the license is available for viewing. The archives of the various historical UNIX ports is here.

Book Review: Linux System Administration – A User’s Guide

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-24 Office 9 Comments

So, you are a Windows user or a not so Unix-oriented person who wants to master the art of administration? Then "Linux System Administration - A User's Guide" book may be just right for you. And if you are already an admin working somewhere, we are sure you will find in this book something you did not know yet. Read more to see what is included in this comprehensive guide to Linux administration.

More Information on the BeOS Dano Version

Submitted by Jake Daniels 2002-01-23 Haiku 115 Comments

The BeOS version 5.1d0 seems to have been extensively leaked on the web the last few days (please respect the OSNews policy and do not post direct download URLs of the illegal beta on our forums). Dianne Hackborn, ex-Be engineer, now at PalmSource, gives more information on what is included in this version of BeOS. There is hardware OpenGL (update: GL is 'broken' on Dano), new networking stack, window decors, XML kit, new USB stack, brand new Printing Kit (and lots of printer drivers for it), new font engine, column list view, tooltip support, updated Media Kit, Interface Kit and app_server, and more. And of course, brand new drivers, like support for the Adaptec U160 SCSI controllers, better SB128 support etc. Reportedly, this BeOS version has some issues with many existing BeOS applications, mostly because of the changes in the app_server. The only peculliar thing is that, as far as we know, Palm's legal department did not take any action against the owners of the servers that carry the leaked beta.

Linux: O(1) Scheduler Benchmarks

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-23 Benchmarks 4 Comments

"Partha Narayanan, from IBM, recently posted some benchmark perfomance results for Ingo's O(1) Scheduler. The tests were run on an 8-way 700Mhz Pentium III, with several comparisons. The end result is around an 18% improvement with a single CPU, around a 45% improvement with 4 CPUs, and around a 187% improvement with 8 CPUs. Pretty impressive!" Read the rest of the article and see the benchmark results at KernelTrap.

Upgrading to .NET – Article at MSDN

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-23 .NET 4 Comments

"Get the core information you need to get the most out of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET, including tips and tricks on the new data access system (ADO.NET) and Web application system (ASP.NET). The articles focus particularly on the Visual Basic developer, but apply across all languages." Read the interesting article at MSDN, among four more .NET-related articles.