Thom Holwerda Archive

The non-profit foundation has decided to increase the version number of the next major release to 1.5 from 1.1, reflecting the sheer number of bug fixes and features that have been worked into the next version of the browser. Mozilla still plans to ship the next version of Firefox around September of this year. Read the updated roadmap here.

CIOs can gain competitive advantages by taking part in the open source revolution, a movement that will shake up the power structure of the IT world, said Julie Hanna Farris, the founder of Scalix. Farris explains why open source is not a fad and how it will benefit the business world.

KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches. Dot.KDE has an interview with the Kde on Solaris team leader.

Asa Dotzler, from the Mozilla foundation, has just written an interesting analysis describing why Linux is not ready for desktops yet, and suggests four main categories that must be addressed to improve this.

Linux powered roughly three times the number of smartphones as Windows Mobile, in worldwide shipments during Q1 of 2005, according to an article at LinuxDevices.com. Additionally, the data cited from Gartner research says smartphones comprise the fastest-growing portion of the "mobile terminal" market, with sales expected to double year-over-year in 2006, reaching 200 million by 2008.

Groovy took a gigantic leap this past April, with the formal release of a new parser aimed at standardizing the language as part of the JSR process. If you weren't paying attention before, now's the time to start. The new syntax is chock full of enhancements to the language designed for a short learning curve and a big payoff. Resident Groovy practitioner Andrew Glover walks through most important changes to Groovy's syntax and shows you a handy feature you won't find in classic Groovy.

Sleep is an embeddable scripting solution for Java applications. Sleep is heavily inspired by Perl with bits of Objective-C thrown in. The Sleep Java API allows the language to be extended with new constructs, operators, functions, and variable containers. Version 2 just got released.

Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn. They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches.

Elive, the Debian based Enlightenment (16.7 and 17) liveCD project has released version 0.1 for download. See the package and features list for more information. A screenshot tour is also available.

On Tuesday, code-analysis software maker Coverity announced that its automated bug finding tool had analyzed the community-built operating system FreeBSD and flagged 306 potential software flaws, or about one issue for every 4,000 lines of code. The low number of flaws found by the system underscores that FreeBSD's manual auditing by project members has reduced the vulnerabilities in the operating system, said Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity.

Classpath 0.17 has been released. This is mainly a bug fix release for issues found with eclipse 3.1 and free Swing applications just after our 0.16 release. But it also includes some exciting new features.

Today at PCBurn we're taking a look at Mark G. Sobell's "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming". It aims to be a complete learning and reference guide to the Linux shell. We'll take a look at the salient points that a reference and teaching book should cover and see how "A Practical Guide..." addresses them.

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

TuxMachines has a quick look at Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 1. This beta has been quietly released over the weekend; DistroWatch lists the mirrors where you can download. You can see the full package list here, and a screenshot gallery here.