Thom Holwerda Archive

"The Gentoo Foundation is both pleased and proud to announce the much anticipated release of Gentoo Linux 2005.1. Due to a scheduled power outage at the Open Source Laboratory affecting our master mirror, the release is currently only available for download via BitTorrent. We anticipate recovery from the downtime and full staging of release material to mirrors within 48 hours, accompanied by a comprehensive PR and ChangeLog." In addition, the Gentoo Installer reached their 0.1 release.

With Vista, Microsoft is addressing what's become a sad truth for most people: PCs run more slowly over time. Vista will automatically de-fragment hard disks, make better use of memory to more quickly load programs, and include a new performance control panel that will identify performance bottlenecks, according to the company. Elsewhere, ActiveWin hosts widescreen, high-res screenshots of Vista.

Growth in the Digital Special Effects and computer animation industry, a sub-segment of the media and entertainment industry, is exploding world wide. A number of reasons have caused this growth and they involve the merging of technology and imagination.This article illustrates the dynamics and business model and processes of the animation effects industry and introduce the existing infrastructure.

Agile development methodologies might be the new fad in software design, but how much emphasis is there on secure code? Australian .NET developer and consultant at Readify, Rocky Heckman, reveals some concerns of agile development methodologies.

Macromedia Monday announced Macromedia Studio 8, the new version of its suite for Web designers, video professionals and graphic artists to design, develop and maintain interactive online applications and content

Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. This means that OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision.

SkyOS Beta 8.5 has just been released. New features include the Indexing Service, an SQL based file attribute and content index service which makes it possible to find your files in a fraction of a second, better developer support, and a lot of bug fixes. NVU has also been ported and is available in this release. You can read the changelog here. Update: Screenshots gallery by OSDir.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2." A list of mirrors is available here.

More details are leaking out about the Debian Core Consortium, which will be announced at next week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The public relations manager of desktop Linux vendor Linspire, Heather MacKenzie, revealed that the "the DCC's official name is the Debian Common Core Alliance."

"One of the new additions of Fedora Core 4 is a natively compiled version of Eclipse. I took it for a spin to see if it is a suitable replacement for 'regular' Eclipse."

In the last few days, KDE developers have been actively discussing usability issues for KDE 4. Here are some thoughts, and some more are here. What do you think?

A new scripting tool targeted by a virus writer will not be part of Windows Vista, the next Windows client release, Microsoft announced Friday. Instead, the software maker is looking at delivering the command-line shell tool, code-named Monad, as part of its next major server operating system release, a Microsoft representative said. That release, code-named Longhorn Server, is due in 2007.

So, you are not sure what makes a Linux distribution a good desktop Linux but you know it when you see it, right? Perhaps but perhaps not. So, what does it take to be a good desktop Linux distribution?

The big themes seem to be networking and minor annoyances, with a secondary focus on iChat and Mail, which always seem to have problems in the first release of a major Mac OS X version. It’s those changes—along with improvements to Tiger’s disk repair tools—that we’ll focus on during this inside look at Mac OS X 10.4.2.