Thom Holwerda Archive

Many times, you need to know how a certain filesystem looked like at some point in time, and you want to be able to roll back changes that happened to it after that point. While there are multiple solutions to achieve this goal, certainly one of them is to use filesystem snapshots. One of the capabilities of unionfs is to offer the possibility of consistently freezing the status of the filesystem at any given point in time (snapshot). Read more...

AMD has filed an antitrust complaint against Intel. On a 48-page complaint AMD explains how the company thinks Intel has maintained its monopoly in the x86 microprocessor market by engaging in worldwide coercion of customers from dealing with AMD. It identifies 38 companies that have been victims of coercion by Intel. AMD claims that Intel's share of this critical market currently counts for about 80 percent of worldwide sales by unit volume and 90 percent by revenue, giving it entrenched monopoly ownership and super-dominant market power.

Recent technology moves toward virtualization have led some industry insiders to question Sun's commitment to letting users run Linux applications under Solaris. However, executives say the company isn't backing off its home-grown efforts.

Now that there are a number of independent projects seeking to create BeOS compatible systems, BeUnited has launched an effort to share and promote the open standards for these Open Standards BeOS-compatible Operating System (OSBOS). Read about it at BeUnited.org

This interview took place just a few months ago, but for some reason we didn't got around in publishing it. (oops... :-) Some things have changed since the interview took place, but most of the information presented there is still valid. Read more for the interview with Xandros' VP, Mr. Michael A. Bego.

This week OSNews spoke to Addison Snell, a Product Marketing Manager at SGI. The legendary computer maker has been through some tumultuous times in the last few years but seems ready to make a healthy resurgence. Two weeks ago they hosted their Global Developer Conference in San Francisco. This is the first of a number of conversations OSNews will be hosting about SGI.

Some software companies might find a new OS a daunting thing to develop for. Not Alias |Wavefront. This leading developer of 3D animation software, recently released the new OSX version of their flagship product, Maya. For a company that wasn't a player in the MacOS world, this is pretty significant vote of confidence in Apple's new OS. OSNews spoke with Andrew Pearce, the Director of Maya Technologies at Alias|Wavefront and with TheOrphanage's Kevin Baille (Visual Effects Artist).

OSX is the beneficiary of more than NeXTStep core technology. Apple's new OS also inherited considerable expertise and terrific developers like the OmniGroup. These longtime developers for NeXTStep have been swept into the Apple world along with their preferred OS. In this significantly larger market, the Omnigroup has the advantage of exceptional depth of experience with OSX. OSNews spoke to Manny from the Omnigroup about their experiences so far.

Progeny Linux, have announced that they will no longer be producing their shrink wrapped distribution of Debian Linux. Progeny plans to continue its Linux consulting service. The company cited the expense of producing a boxed distro in an increasingly competitive market, and the fact that its offerings are now mostly available in the main Debian archive.

Just in time for the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this week, we here at OSNews thought that we would bring our readers an interview from the world of embedded OSes.
OSNews was happy to meet with Paul Leroux of QNX Software Systems at their headquarters in Kanata, part of the Silicon Valley North area around Ottawa, Ontario. With 20 years of experience in the field, QNX is synonymous with embedded systems. Many people will be familiar with the QNX demo disk that fit their OS, GUI, browser, web server, games, TCP/IP, and more onto a 1.44M bootable floppy. In 2000 QNX gained notoriety for making the QNX realtime platform free for non-commercial use. QNX has been riding a wave of buzz in this last year. We spoke during the hectic lead up to Embedded Systems Conference.