Thom Holwerda Archive

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 macOS 27 Comments

Compared to Panther, the Mac OS X 10.3 system software, Tiger exhibits broad performance improvements. It's noticeably faster at booting the system and loading applications. PDF rendering and all text and graphics rendering is faster with Tiger on late-model Macs. Elsewhere, the new IBM chip could serve a PowerBook G5, but is it too little too late?

OpenBSD Hackathon 2005

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 OpenBSD 3 Comments

At the 2005 OpenBSD hackathon, Fernando Gont proposed ways to fix a 20 year old flaw in the design of the ICMP protocol that could be used to make TCP attacks. Kerneltrap has the details.

New Ubuntu Foundation Announced

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 Ubuntu 58 Comments

Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu will remain fully supported for an extended period of time.

Vendors Team On Debian-Based Enterprise Linux

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 Debian 61 Comments

Sources close to Mandriva, Progeny and Turbolinux say the trio of companies will be announcing a new enterprise Linux distribution based on Debian Linux at the LinuxWorld event in San Francisco in August.

Microsoft Security Bulletin Notification; Interview Steve Ballmer

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 Windows 14 Comments

Coming patch tuesday, Microsoft will issue fixes for two Windows critical bugs, and one for Microsft Office, among others. In addition, here is a short interview with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO. You can watch the video (140MB, Windows Media), or read the transcript.

Jetty And The Future Of Browser-Based Applications

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 Internet 11 Comments

More and more projects use the browser as a primary means of communicating with the program. The main drawback of this approach is that it requires the user to configure and maintain his own Web server, or else requires the program to come bundled with a Web server. Jetty is simple for both programmers and users, making it a good choice for bundled web server.

SuSE 9.3, My Desktop OS

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-08 SuSE, openSUSE 47 Comments

SuSE 9.3 is the most polished and easy to use release from SuSE. It goes a long way in dispelling the notion that Linux is not ready for the desktop. It is a comprehensive release with enhanced hardware detection and configuration and an exhaustive suite of available applications.

Debian Fixes Security Problems

Submitted by george 2005-07-08 Debian 1 Comment

After suffering manpower and other issues, Debian says it has finally addressed concerns that it was falling behind on security. Debian's elected leader Branden Robinson yesterday flagged an inquiry into the processes by which security updates are released, citing a potential lack of transparency and communication failures.

IBM Reveals Dualcore And Low Power G5s

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 IBM 96 Comments

IBM has today presented various new versions of their G5 processor at the Power Everywhere Forum in Japan. Firstly, it introduced the much-anticipated PowerPC 970MP, the dual-core version of the G5. In addition, they also announced 3 low-power G5s, ranging from 1.2Ghz at 13W to 1.6Ghz at 16W. These processors will most likely find their way into Apple's Macs.

Basic Networking: Windows To Linux Fedora

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 Internet 33 Comments

Can a Windows system and a Linux system talk together harmoniously? After all, there is a lot of work and personal data left on Windows PCs that many want to keep! So this question of networking the two systems is both reasonable and vital.

FUDCon2 Presentations Available

Submitted by Rahul 2005-07-07 Fedora Core 11 Comments

FUDCon 2, the second gathering of Fedora Users and Developers, was held at LinuxTag, on the 24th and 25th of June in Karlsruhe, Germany. FUDCon 2 featured presentations from prominent members of the Fedora Project, both from Red Hat and from the Fedora community.

GNOME Desktop And Developer Platform 2.10.2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 Gnome 45 Comments

The second point release of the stable 2.10.x branch of GNOME is now officially released. This release has seen continued work to eliminate memory leaks, plain bugs and in general improve and polish the stable series of GNOME. Source: bindings, desktop, platform.

Building And Installing OpenSolaris (Part 1)

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 Solaris 15 Comments

This is the first of two articles in which we describe how to acquire and build the source code for OpenSolaris. The first article provides all the necessary background information (terminology, where to get the tools, and so on) and describes a basic compilation and installation, and the second article will describe a more complicated compilation and installation.

Terra Soft Ships G4 ATX Workstation

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 Linux 34 Comments

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.

RISC OS To Get 3D Hardware Acceleration

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 RISC OS 21 Comments

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.

Microsoft Releases Windows Server System, Fixes IE Hole

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 Microsoft 8 Comments

Windows Server System brings together several existing products and comes with three copies of the Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, a copy of Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition and a copy of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition. Elsewhere, MS released a fix to a major IE hole confirmed last week, while some eyebrows are raised as MS downgrades its Claria detections.

An Introduction To Delta Debugging

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-07 General Development 9 Comments

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...

Cedega & Point2Play: Introduction

Submitted by Hugo 2005-07-07 Games 22 Comments

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.

Sifting Through The OS X Small Stuff; Apple’s Switch An Incentive?

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-06 macOS 55 Comments

Two interesting articles on OS X today. This one summarizes some of the less-obvious new features of Apple's Tiger. The other one theorizes that Apple's shift to Intel is an incentive for Windows developers to port their software due to the lack of the endian problem.

Introducing Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-06 Windows 29 Comments

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.