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Monthly Archive:: August 2007

‘Busting the FUD about Vista’s DRM’

  Submitted by Jonas Persson Windows 119 Comments
"Gutmann generated a lot of heat last December with the publication of a paper that called Windows Vista's Content Protection scheme 'the longest suicide note in history'. He updated it in April, mostly to call his critics names, and he updated it yet again yesterday with a top-of-the-page slam at my ZDNet colleague George Ou, who took exception with some of Gutmann's claims yesterday. Gutmann has a flair for melodramatic language and headline-grabbing phrases, but his theoretical arguments against Vista's video subsystem fall apart quickly when they make contact with the real world."
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IBM To Implement Sun Solaris on x86-Based System x

  Submitted by flanque IBM 22 Comments
"IBM and Sun Microsystems did indeed announce an agreement for deploying the Solaris operating system on IBM servers, but it wasn't the system we guessed: IBM will deploy Solaris for its Intel x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers. It's a significant move, as it validates the presence of Sun's operating system among a broad customer base that few can mistake as a "niche." As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told reporters today, IBM becomes the first Tier 1 reseller of Solaris products and services for x86 platforms." His blog is here.
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Syllable Server Video Demonstration

  Submitted by Kaj de Vos Syllable, AtheOS 10 Comments
The videos of the announcements made at the 2007 Syllable Conference are now available. For those who don't have Syllable 0.6.4 yet, there's a demonstration video . Turning our attention to the future, there's a demonstration video of Syllable Server, the server companion to Syllable Desktop that is under development and is being built on the Linux kernel . These videos contain some bloopers, but they decided to present them uncut. They were transcoded on Syllable with the Media Converter application. Also, there are a few contributed videos on YouTube: EFileBrowser on VMware, Syllable 0.6.3 on VirtualPC, on VMware, part 1 and part 2.
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The HelenOS Project

  Submitted by jeanmarc OS News 21 Comments
"The HelenOS project is an effort to develop a complete and usable modern operating system, yet offering room for experimenting and research. HelenOS uses its own microkernel written from scratch and supports SMP, multitasking and multithreading on both 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian and big-endian processor architectures, among wich are AMD64/EM64T (x86-64), ARM, IA-32, IA-64 (Itanium), 32-bit MIPS, 32-bit PowerPC, SPARC V9 and Xen 3.0. Thanks to the relatively high number of supported architectures and suitable design, HelenOS is extremely-well portable."
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Citrix Acquiring XenSource for USD 500 Million

OS News 25 Comments
Citrix Systems is acquiring XenSource, whose founders helped develop the open-source Xen hypervsior, for USD 500 million in a move that caps a significant week in the development of virtualization technology. The XenSource acquisition, which both companies announced Aug. 15, comes just a day after VMware, which has long been the dominant player in the x86 virtualization market, announced an initial public offering of 33 million shares of stock. By the end of its first day of trading, the company's stock closed at almost USD 51 a share.
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AmigaOS ‘4+1’ To Have Virtual Environment for AmigaOS 4 Apps

  Submitted by Raffaele Amiga & AROS 71 Comments
In a discussion on Amiga forum site The Amigans, the Friedens twin brothers (developers of AmigaOS 4.0 exec kernel) revealed that the complete Amiga OS architecture will move ahead to a new design. The new AmigaOS (let's call it AmigaOS 4+1) will include some sort of virtual environment in which old (AmigaOS 4.0) applications will run as separate tasks, in their own address space. MorphOS, an Amiga-like operating system, employs a similar method to allow for compatibility with older Amiga 3.x applications. AmigaWorld of course also discusses the matter.
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Microsoft Fixes 14 Flaws in 9 Patches; 6 Are Critical

  Submitted by Kennon Microsoft 29 Comments
Microsoft today released its August 2007 security bulletin, which includes nine updates: Six are designated as 'critical' by the software giant and three are deemed 'important'. Two patches affect Microsoft products on the Mac, and one affects Windows Vista. All Microsoft security patches for Windows and Office software are available via Microsoft Update or via individual bulletins.
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GNOME Turns Ten

Gnome 99 Comments
"We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software." Those were the opening lines of Miguel De Icaza's email announcing the GNU Network Object Model Environment, better known as GNOME, exactly (in my timezone) ten years ago, on 15th August 1997. They have come a long way from this, to this.
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FalterCon: Impressions

Haiku 75 Comments
"FalterCon 2007 took place on August 11, and it went quite well (IMHO, of course). Here I would like to share my personal impressions of the event, as well as make a few (somewhat) related observations. When the news of the WalterCon cancellation broke out and I read about some people being left with non-refundable air tickets, my first reaction was 'OK, let's do something with these guys'. A few emails later with Mike Summers, Bryan Varner and Urias, we had decided on having a community gathering which, as many of you know, was to later be called FalterCon (yes, pun intended). In approximately two weeks, we found a venue (and a good one!), had this website running, prepared some nice promo material, and were able to gather nine people willing to attend. All in all, I think we did pretty well given the very little time we had."
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A Messy Transition: Vista Buys Some Time

  Submitted by tudyparghel Windows 48 Comments
"As we saw in part 1 of this series, large applications and games under Windows are getting incredibly close to hitting the 2GB barrier, the amount of virtual address space a traditional Win32 (32-bit) application can access. Once applications begin to hit these barriers, many of them will start acting up and/or crashing in unpredictable ways which makes resolving the problem even harder. Furthermore, as we saw in part 2, games are consuming greater amounts of address space under Windows Vista than Windows XP. This makes Vista less suitable for use with games when at the same time it will be the version of Windows that will see the computing industry through the transition to 64-bit operating systems becoming the new standard. Microsoft knew about the problem, but up until now we were unable to get further details on what was going on and why. As of today that has changed."
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‘Increasing Virtualization Insanity’

  Submitted by diegocg OS News 29 Comments
The GNU libc maintainer writes: "People are starting to realize how broken the Xen model is with its privileged Dom0 domain. But the actions they want to take are simply ridiculous: they want to add the drivers back into the hypervisor. There are many technical reasons why this is a terrible idea. You'd have to add all the PCI handling and lots of other lowlevel code which is now maintained as part of the Linux kernel. But this is of course also the direction of VMWare who loudly proclaim that in the future we won't have OS as they exist today."
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‘Cross-Platform Microsoft’

  Submitted by WillM Microsoft 69 Comments
"Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I’ve heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."
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Is My Hardware Linux-Compatible?

  Submitted by irbis Linux 16 Comments
"Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available."
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Windows XP: the OS that Won’t Die?

  Submitted by flanque Windows 125 Comments
Microsoft has had to create a new build of Windows XP Professional for computer makers because the six-year-old operating system's continued popularity has nearly exhausted the supply of product activation keys. The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to OEMs and system builders next month, said Microsoft.
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