Thom Holwerda Archive

Terra Soft Solutions, the leading developer of integrated Power Architecture Linux solutions, today announces a VAR relationship with Genesi for provision of the Open Desktop Workstation with Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed.

Hardware accelerated 3D graphics on RISC OS took a step closer to reality, thanks to Simon Wilson. He claims to have ported Mesa 3.2, a 3D graphics library that sports an OpenGL software interface. More importantly, he says he has also ported an Nvidia graphics accelerator from BeOS to harness the GeForce2 video card in the Iyonix to plot graphics fast in hardware.

Delta Debugging is an automatic and systematic technique that deals with isolation of the source of the failure -- often the developer's longest, most demotivating, and most repetitive activity when carried out manually. Read more...

One of the things lacking on Linux is breadth of native commercial games. That's where emulating (or re-implementing) the host enviroment that the game was created for with Cedega (or WINE) comes in.

Bink.nu has some interesting information on Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. It is 64bit only, and consists of 2 CD's. They also posted a set of screenshots.

Today the latest SVN checkout of Haiku sources gave us very good news: app_server can now run Tracker (screenshot 1 2 3), although it crashes so often that it is actually unusable. You can check this yourself by downloading a Haiku image from Philipp Schmid's blog and running it in Virtual PC (or VMWare). This news is a sign that Haiku is near alpha release.

De Raadt's team makes OpenBSD, an operating system, and OpenSSH, for secure communications. Here, he talks about why he does it, about industry use of open-source software, and about dedication to quality paying off.

On Tuesday, Microsoft posted a patch to its web site designed to prevent the problem, known as a memory leak. This error has plagued Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system for a long time. In addition, the software giant has promised not to charge for security fixes, but will charge for virus protection.

The European Parliament today decided by a large majority to reject the software patents directive. This rejection was the logical answer to the Commission's refusal to restart the legislative process in February and the Council's unwillingness to engage in any kind of dialogue with the Parliament. Update: Sun and Red Hat made a joint statement today.

A Sun Microsystems desktop engineer has outlined plans to release the code for the company's Java Desktop System (JDS) environment and integrate it better with OpenSolaris.

Sun may have streamlined its Java development process and intensified its marketing around the openess of the programming language and platform, but some smaller partners are still not happy.

Every Fedora Core release outshines the previous one, Fedora Core 4 maintains this pattern with an excellent collection of the latest open source packages and improved performance. Two areas that still need some work are out-of-the-box sound mixing and package management

Matthew Dillon has made significant progress on DragonFly's journaling code, which can now mirror partitions. Essentially all that remains now is for the "reverse journaling" work to be completed (allowing for filesystem rollback), and for stability to be increased. More information here and here

Although Apple hasn’t announced which Intel chips will power the upcoming Mactel systems, the most likely suspects are microprocessors that have been dubbed Yonha, Celeron D 3515, Conroe, Woodcrest, Smithfield and Merom. For the rest of the week, we’ll offer a look at the chips and what they might mean to Mac users.