Monthly Archive:: August 2006

In this final installment on testing of the three part series, Brian Goetz examines another technique for smoking out bugs that violate design rules: aspects. The first two installments in this series, Part 1 covering testing in integrated frameworks and Part 2 on testing with leverage, show how static analysis tools like Find Bugs can provide greater leverage in managing software quality by focusing on entire categories of bugs rather than on specific bug instances.

Vista will be the last version of Windows that exists in its current, monolithic form, according to Gartner. Instead, the research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced to migrate Windows to a modular architecture tied together through hardware-supported virtualisation. "The current, integrated architecture of Microsoft Windows is unsustainable - for enterprises and for Microsoft," wrote Gartner analysts Brian Gammage, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith.

Normally we try not to report on music players, but since this concerns Microsoft's direct attack on Apple's music player, it's actually somewhat interesting. "Microsoft's forthcoming Zune player is shooting to be the life of the party, allowing users to create mobile social networks and stream music to nearby friends or strangers, according to a government regulatory filing. A Microsoft representative confirmed that the filing is legitimate and that Toshiba will manufacture the Zune device, but declined to offer additional details or comment on the information in the FCC filing."

Microsoft has reached Pre-RC1 with this latest release, Build 5536. The screenshots taken show some of the new features in this build. According to a quick test, Pre-RC1 is very stable and fast. "This build is Pre-RC1 as the screenshots demonstrate. 5536 is surprisingly stable and fast compared to all previous builds."

When Mac sales dropped off in 1985, Bill Gates personally wrote John Sculley suggesting that he license the Macintosh design to companies like Apollo, DEC and Wang, and establish the software as the industry standard. Apple declined, and Microsoft published Windows. Sculley was enraged, and eventually filed suit. After five years, Apple lost, but not before severely damaging its relationship with Microsoft (which accounted for 2/3 of all Mac software sales).

Release Candidate 3 of Slackware 11.0 has been released. Patrick says this will most likely be the last RC but he won't rule out an RC4. One important thing in this release: kernel 2.6 has been moved out of /testing and placed into /extra. From the changelog: "Here is Slackware 11.0 release candidate 3. I think most of the irresistible upgrades are in here now, and the bug reports have been mostly handled."

Linux-Noob has reviewed SLED 10. "Novell's strengths are many, and I'm delighted to see the excellent work they have done in usability tests, and making the whole desktop feel like it's ready, ready to do business, and ready to serve its users. The development they've done with Beagle and in particular the 'computer menu' are fantastic and hopefully are just the start of better things to come."

T2 SDE 6.0.0 has been released with various prebuilt .iso images for AMD64, i386, PPC, PPC64, and SPARC64. The various architectures include support for Intel Macs as well as Sun's T1 Niagara CPU, and ship with Xorg 7.0, GCC 4.1.1, KDE 3.5.4, GNOME 2.14.3, and much more. T2 SDE is not just a common Linux distribution - it is a flexible open source System Development Environment. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions. Currently the Linux kernel is used - but they are expanding to MINIX, Hurd, OpenDarwin, and OpenBSD.

"The cipherfunk web site, which made extra packages available to Ubuntu and MEPIS users, was shut down in response to complaints from Ubuntu team members Matthew Garrett and Philipp Kern. It is my understanding they alleged that cipherfunk was not making modified GPLed source code available in a timely fashion. You can read about it the website." "Well, the GNU GPL states as part of Section 3 of the licence that I must provide source code on request for no more than the cost of physically performing the distribution. Given that the host this box is on actually costs me 110.95AUD every 30 days to run, 9.90AUD, as nice as that is - still will cost me over 100AUD to distribute the code at all." Update: As Matthew Garret pointed out in the comments, he wrote his side of the story on his blog.

"What follows is meant to be a hands-on introduction to system programming, using C and the Sartoris microkernel. Knowledge of the C programming language is assumed. This tutorial should have you writing, compiling and booting several little programs presto. In order to do this, you will need access to a *nix system and development tools. Linux is what we use over here, but if you are a windows user, Cygwin will do as well."

Adam Dunkels, well-known author of the Contiki operating system and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, has written a really small BASIC interpreter called uBASIC in about 700 lines of C code. It is intended to be a very small scripting language for systems where memory really is at a premium such as deeply embedded systems which may have as little as a few hundreds of bytes of RAM. It provides an interesting look into how to write a very lightweight script interpreter.

GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note: After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

The GNOME team has released RC1 of GNOME 2.16. "We are pleased to announce the release of GNOME 2.16.0 Release Candidate 1 (2.15.92). This is one of the last releases in the 2.15 development series and represents a release that is now API/ABI, feature, string and UI frozen. Hard code freeze is quickly approaching : this means that we're pretty close to the final 2.16.0 release. The GNOME contributors are now busy fixing the most important bugs that are still out there, localizing the whole desktop or updating our documentation." You can use jhbuild or GARNOME to build it.

After bitter statements around Xen's maturity these last weeks from Red Hat, Novell, and XenSource itself, the company finally launched its first commercial product based on the open source hypervisor: XenEnterprise 1.0. The product adds commercial grade features and support to Xen 3.0. XenSource also built around it a sales channel infrastructure, a technical certification program, and a much discussed agreement with Microsoft.