Monthly Archive:: October 2003

The Xerox Alto, the computer that introduced us to the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and forever aliented Command-Line Interface (CLI) programmers everywhere, has reached the ripe old age of 30. So, Vintage and the Computer History Museum is celebrating this weekend it in grand style by having a panel of past and present Xerox PARC luminaries speak about the development of the Alto. They are also featuring a line-up of classic (and working) Xerox machines. Jef Raskin will speak on the second day of the event, so if you live in the Bay Area, don't miss it this weekend! OSNews featured a related retro article with many cool pictures a few months ago.

Three interesting Mac-related articles on the net today: "Macs vs PCs", "From Linux to OS X" and "A Disappointing Look At Apple’s Dual G5 Tower. Not The Machine I thought It Was" (article updated).

Microsoft's Poole said there were tremendous opportunities for driving future innovation through Longhorn and the integration it would bring, including giving Microsoft the ability to more easily and effectively deliver smart applications.

In advance of the official release announcement, the MandrakeSoft web site maintainers have uploaded the images for the 9.2 Feature Presentation. Tux Reports now has copies of most of these images, and can view them in the Screenshots Gallery. Click here to view the images.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said it is working through ECMA International, the Geneva-based standards organization, to push the development of a standard set of language extensions that will create a binding between the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard C++ programming language and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

This page is dedicated to providing information on running Linux on the Pegasos. ISO images included. We would love to see a better Yellow Dog Linux support and also Darwin on Pegasos.

It arrived in the mail today: the Java Desktop System beta, in the form of a live CD, based on SuSE's 8.2 live evaluation CD. I was eager to try Sun's attempt at creating a user-friendly Linux distribution, so I signed up for beta-testing, and this live-CD is the result.

The new VMWare 4.0.5 release introduces internationalization of the shared folders and drag and drop features. These features now support localized guest operating systems, including locales such as Japanese that use double-byte characters. In this release, VMware Tools for Windows guests uses less memory than in previous releases.

Scott Long released the March-Sepetember 2003 Status report, reviewing the past seven months of FreeBSD development. The paper is loaded with updates covering Bluetooth, ACPI, dynamically linked /bin, icc support, cryptographic support, java, KSE, porting OpenBSD's pf, and much more. Elsewhere, this paper describes an automated system for building and distributing binary security updates for FreeBSD, and describes the challenges encountered.

The software giant will focus on adding new security technologies to its products, educating its customers and improving its process of releasing patches, CEO Steve Ballmer says.

A few days ago an Amiga event took place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Here are some reports of this event (1 , 2). Furthermore the new ITX AmigaOne board will be shown at various Australian AmigaOS4 events and also it is now confirmed that the OS will support Blizzard PPC cards in addition to the AmigaOne and Cyberstorm cards.

KernelTrap reports that 2.6.0-test7 is out. Only bugfix patches will be accepted from now on.

YellowTAB provided us with a copy of Zeta 1.0 RC-1pre+ plus a few additional patches that were not available at the CD's press time. We installed and tried out this new version and here's what we think.

IBM posted information (alternative link here) on their Global Solutions Directory about the upcoming Pegasos 2. Read the "Functional Description" for the hardware specs.