Monthly Archive:: January 2004

DragonFly BSD was announced in July of this year, with Matt Dillon the originator and main weightlifter of this project. Development has been proceeding at a good clip, with a first release expected in 2004. Here's some data on the amount of activity in the DragonFly source, as of the end of December 2003.

KDE project is planning on announcing QtGTK library which was written by one of its core developers. The library integrates Qt event loop with GNOME. Thanks to that whole KDE framework can be used from any GTK+ application just like it would be a native part of it. The library itself is already available here. There seems to be also a tutorial on how to use it here. Reportedly Gimp already works with it.

Xandros does Linux sans Tux, but the big question remains: Does being fast, easy, and astonishingly elegant buy it success on a down and dirty desktop? Asks Open Magazine.

Xfce is an easy-to-use and easy-to-configure environment for X11 based on GTK2. In 4.0.3 a leak in the window manager was fixed, so upgrading is highly recommended. Various file manager bugs were fixed. Translation updates were made. Support for the KDE system tray was added.

Linus Torvalds has released Linux Kernel 2.6.1-rc3. This release includes mostly small bug fixes.

It seems that I am in some sort of retro-mode. As Linux on the desktop is getting bigger and better, with more apps, more sleek looks (Galaxy, Keramik and Blue Curve for example) and more idiot proof, I am going onto simpler, more condensed stuff. The big distributions are nice, but I really do not need all the applications that come with them all the time.

Windows Server 2003 for 64-Bit Extended Systems provides high performance for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system. The underlying architecture is based on 64-bit extensions to the industry-standard x86 instruction set, allowing today's 32-bit applications to run natively on 64-bit extended processors such as AMD Opteron. At the same time, new 64-bit applications are executed in 64-bit mode, which processes more data per clock cycle, allows greater access to memory, and speeds numeric calculations. Read the newly published information here.

Gates' keynote address features new Media Center technologies, MSN Services and smart watches for MSN Direct; Gates highlights growing role of software in consumer electronics. Here is the web siet for the newly announced Media Center Devices.

"Overall, and more so for its targeted market, Xandros 2.0 is a very well thought out and put together distribution. That's not to say Xandros is perfect, or perfect for everyone, but it is an excellent place to start for people coming from Windows who want to use Linux and don't care about learning all the interworkings of the operating system." Read the review at LinuxReview.

Some say that Microsoft's major markets are mature and saturated. What lies ahead for the software giant? A retrospective and overview on the issue here.

"The FreeBSD installation process requires what many Windows users would likely call "a lot of command-line interaction." Coming from a Windows environment to something like FreeBSD takes a bit of getting used to, if you have to install the operating system yourself. If you're slightly above average in experience, I'd say go for it; you'll like it, and you should have no trouble to speak of." Read the installation overview at NewsForge.

This document attempts to give a hacker over-friendly answer to the question "What is Mac OS X?".

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are a new concept to many who now have the task of doing everything it takes to develop a VoiceXML application. This (old but interesting) article describes the difference between the VUI and the long-familiar GUI.

There is now an Exposé-clone available for Windows-users to purchase. Exposé is a new function of managing open windows on Mac OS X Panther.