Eugenia Loli Archive

With Linux on the desktop going from a slow crawl to verging on an explosion, many have toiled with the question: How do we make this happen faster? A well-known Austin-based Linux Advocate thinks he has the answer.

The OpenJDK Porters Group approved by a unanimous vote the proposal submitted by the recently formed Haiku Java Team to port OpenJDK to Haiku. This makes Haiku the first OS platform to be sponsored by the Porters Group, and it means that the port is now officially part of the OpenJDK family of projects endorsed by Sun. The team already has a mailing list and a project home page; a mercurial repository is also on its way. Team lead Bryan Varner gives his latest update here on his blog.

Glyphobet writes "I've largely stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu because of the condescending and dismissive attitude from their developers. Until Ubuntu's bug management culture starts to change, people like me, who can actually help make Ubuntu better, will be less and less likely to contribute."

Hi-Mobile.net sent us over one of the highest-end phones ever released, the Nokia N82. A rich smartphone, running the latest version of Symbian OS and S60 3.1 is sure to raise some eyebrowses as the model resembles in feature-set (of its time) and overall looks of the very successful 6680 that was first released in early 2005. In fact, the more I look at this model, the more I get the feeling that a product manager walked in at an engineering meeting one Monday morning and proclaimed: "Gentlemen, we need to resurrect the 6680".

The major competitor of unlocked iPhones in Asia and Europe is the LG Prada and Viewty phones. TimTechs.com sent us in a LG KU990 Viewty unit for a review and we give it a whirl.

After seven months of comprehensive development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. This version builds portably on a wide variety of Unix platforms and includes initial support for XAR as a package format, among other features.

A few weeks ago I published an editorial on the new school of videographers that has recently started to emerge as profoundly as digital art photography did a few years ago. (OS) News are slow during holiday seasons, so I thought I put together an article with a small collection of some of the best examples of amateur cinematography for your viewing pleasure, as found on the popular with the movement site, Vimeo.com. Leave a comment with what you think of these clips, or even download them in order to watch them in full HD quality through your AppleTV, XboX360 or PS3.

"It's hateful when a developer takes a 'shortcut' that saves that individual a couple of minutes, but thereafter causes extra effort from every single user. Awful as they are, these application design errors - all the fault of lazy developers - are entirely too common."

Valgrind is a tool that helps you find memory management problems in Linux programs. From the 3.3.0 log: Helgrind works again with improved race detection and better error messages. Massif generates better output. Cachegrind has been extended to do branch-misprediction profiling. Both conditional and indirect branches are profiled. Scalability has been improved for very large programs, particularly those with a million or more malloc'd blocks in use at once. These improvements mostly affect Memcheck, which is also up to 10% faster for all programs, with x86 Linux seeing the largest improvement. The documentation has been reorganized. Experimental tools have been added, and more.

The GNOME 2.21.4 Development Release is now available: This is the third release of the GNOME 2.21.x series, heading towards the stable GNOME 2.22.x release.

A relatively lengthy Q&A with Ciaran McCreesh about Paludis, the Portage alternative for Gentoo.

Apple and Linux are engaged in battle – a battle to win over disgruntled Windows users. But who will win, and what will the consequences be for the loser? The most commonly held belief amongst Apple and Linux fanboys is that both factions are engaged in some kind of a war with Microsoft. The truth is that if you look at the market share figure for Windows, Mac and Linux, both Mac OS and all the Linux distros that have ever been released are dwarfed by Windows.

We don't publish lots of camera reviews at OSNews, but sometimes something refreshing and interesting comes out, and we feel the need to report on it. Geeks.com sent us for the purposes of this review the Kodak V1253, a 12 megapixel digicam with a 3.1" screen, that can also record 720p MPEG4-SP video at 30fps. At just $220, this must be one of the cheapest 720p solution in the market.

It seems that each distribution has found a niche: Red Hat and Ubuntu are the leaders in their markets, and SUSE is a comfortable runner-up. However, history has shown us that businesses are not content to stay still too long or play second fiddle. So, what will Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu have to do in the new year to gain new ground?