Monthly Archive:: December 2003

Mozilla 1.6b is a beta development version for the popular OSS browser. Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 was released recently as well.

At Genesi we do more than just alternative computers, we also have interests in the field of Digital Media and Digital Television, you'll see products targeted to these segments arriving in the future. Most people appear to think that the future of Digital Media is convergence, that it is inevitable that TVs and Computers are going to converge and become a single device. Some people however think that this will not happen, they may have good reason for thinking so.

While the second Service Pack of Zeta 1.0-RC1 is out and about, Argentinian Zeta fans have published two interviews with YellowTAB's Bernd Korz here and here.

TrollTech recently Qt 3.3 introduces many new features as well as many improvements over the 3.2.x series. The Qt version 3.3 series is binary compatible with the 3.2.x series. Qt 3.3 is .NET enabled, it supports IPv6 in addition to IPv4 and it now includes a new tool class called QLocale among other new goodies. Its Qt/Embedded version has added support for SNAP graphics drivers from SciTech Software. This gives access to accelerated drivers for more than 150 graphics chipsets (new SciTech DDK here).

Linux news is getting more and more exciting, and somehow, managing to get less and less interesting. Why? Because the speed of development is getting so rapid that it's hard to get excited for each upcoming release, keep your system completely up to date, and even remember what the current version of your favorite distributions are. This breakneck pace of development means good and bad things, but I have a few ideas about how I expect it to turn out.

GTK+OSX's project manager, Robin Rowe, is now in search of Mac/Unix developers to help him out with a native port of GTK+ for Mac OS X, based on Carbon and without the aid of X11. The port is already usable (CinePaint can run on it) but there is a lot of work still to be done. A stable native GTK+ port could enrich significantly the OSX application base with free open source like Gimp, Bluefish or Anjuta and add to the elegance without the use of X11 (Robin said the port will use an OSX theme by default).

This is a development release leading up to GTK+ 2.4. Changes since GTK+ 2.3.0 consist of numerous small bug fixes and enhancements, with a special focus on the new GtkFileChooser. Glib, Pango announcements. On other Gnome/GTK+ news, Gnomemeeting 0.99 was released today too (review).

"Everyone is talking about Windows clusters, Unix clusters and Linux cluster. But all we are saying, is that the 20 year-old architecture of clustered OpenVMS can teach these whippersnappers a thing or two. At OpenVMS.org there's a report about an OpenVMS cluster which handles the major processing for the Greater Amsterdam Police and naturally is required 24/7." Read the story at TheInquirer.

ActiveState today announced the release of Tcl Dev Kit 3.0. The solution includes new features for the rapid development and delivery of professional quality Tcl applications, and sets a new bar for developer productivity and performance for in-depth code analysis, management, debugging, and deployment.

2.4 stable kernel maintainer Marcelo Tosatti announced that XFS has been merged into the 2.4 kernel.

Anaconda-enabled Sarge install images are now available here.

The official release is here and you can start downloading the KDE 3.2-beta2 from here.

A 20-year IT consulting veteran and author of "The Unix Guide to Defenestration" offers the second in a series of four articles that examine the state of computing as he imagines it will be five years from now. Last week's article was on Microsoft's vision for its future software. This week, he looks at where the Unix and open source alternative is likely to go and, next week, at the hardware both groups can expect to have available to run their software. The last of the series will look at the impact these changes are likely to have on the IT industry itself.

If you are a DBA or a database programmer, your manager may have asked you to prepare a breakdown of employees by location and department, or a breakdown of products by category and provider. If your boss is a techie, instead of a breakdown she might have mentioned a pivot table, or, if she likes to use "the right words," a cross-tabulation, Giuseppe Maxia writes. Elsewhere on OnLamp.com another article advises on "Quick and Dirty RDBMS Tuning".