Monthly Archive:: August 2003

The following is an interview with Ola Jensen and Adam Chodorowski, two of the core developers of the Amiga Research Operating System (AROS), a project to develop a open source Amiga OS clone.

Linux World Expo is underway, and Gentoo has announced the release of version 1.4. It's available at the usual mirrors.

In this extended review - "Linux servers battle for enterprise recognition" - InfoWorld compares four different and well-known Linux products dedicated to business environments, mostly for server use: Mandrake Linux ProSuite 9.1, Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server ES 2.1, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and TurbolinuxEnterprise Server 8. Many tests, including load tests, have been performed on three different systems. This article underlines the overall excellent quality of all these Linux solutions, with notes from 7.6/10 (TurboLinux) to 8.4/10 (Mandrake).

If your computer is having persistent stability problems, it may be bad RAM. Now that Windows is a bit more stable than it was back in the bad old days, Microsoft would like to give users a way to point the finger back at their own hardware if their computer is acting up. It released a memory diagnostic utility yesterday.

"The purpose of this complaint is to demonstrate that Red Hat's technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO and to hold SCO accountable for its unfair and deceptive actions." The article is here. fuzzyping also points to this story.

An anonymous contributor writes "An interesting legal commentary on SCO can be found at web page for the Law Office of Lewis A. Mettler which includes some highly critical comments about SCO, their actions, and their legal approach. Another attorney, Tom Carey warned that SCO needs to include some interesting terms in its new licenses. Otherwise, "SCO will have committed the business equivalent of extortion, assuming they lose their case against IBM..." Mark Radcliffe, from the same firm as Carey, although he appears to have some doubts about Eben Moglen's OSDL position paper, also points out some issues with SCO's position in the same article."

"Microsoft said last week it plans to hire 4,000 to 5,000 new workers and to increase research spending by about 8 percent, to $6.9 billion per year. The company also said it has $49 billion lying around collecting interest. So what should Bill and Steve do with these wondrous resources? My suggestion: Start over." It's radical, but interesting. Check out the rest on zdnet.

From their press release: "Now, yellowTAB presents a fully-functional, fully-featured implementation of ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) for Zeta! Both the API and the user interface for configuring ODBC connections is 100% compatible with the original Windows version and its UNIX clones."

Fleecy Moss has answered 10 new Amiga community questions addressing various topics at the AmigaWorld.net portal. This week AmigaOS4 events are sheduled for New York and Denmark.

InceptionOS, a Linux distribution aimed at full LSB compliance, but not based on an existing Linux distribution, is currently looking for people to participate in the creation of a new distribution. If you're interested, read on.

For over an hour today, the Microsoft website was brought offline. Reports indicate that it was a standard Denial of Service attack, rather than an exploit in their hosting platform itself (Windows Server 2003, at last check). However, there is a certain likelyhood that the launch-points for this attack were themselves exploited Windows-based computers. The Department of Homeland Security today issued an unprecedented second warning regaring recent Windows exploits. Is this an isolated incident, or is it an ominous indication of pending cyber attacks on popular internet sites?

LinuxTag, Europe's largest Linux show was held from the 10th to the 13th of July 2003 in Karlsruhe Kongresszentrum, Germany. Myself and a colleague (Debian developer Sven Luther) were there for 3 of those days. The organisers took to the free software philosophy with some enthusiasm, the entrance is free but the downloadable ticket is supplied with LaTex source code! Then again this is the same organisation which, knowing German law didn't allow you to threaten legal action without proof told SCO to put up or shut up, SCO promptly shut up.

In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org Asa discusses the formation of the the Mozilla Foundation, the direction Mozilla is headed, Microsoft's decision to no longer offer IE as a standalone product, acceptance of the browser as a client interface to applications and more. Additionally, Mozilla 1.5A, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 and Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 were released recently.

The XPde Team released XPde 0.4.0, a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. Check out the announcement, view the screenshots or read the detailed ChangeLog. Go to the downloads section to get the binaries and sources.