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Monthly Archive:: October 2007

Mac OS X Leopard Gets Last Minute Tweaks

macOS 22 Comments
At the last minute, Apple has changed the appearance of the Dock in Mac OS X Leopard when it is placed on the sides of the screen. If so, the dock will lose its much-criticised 3D appearance in favour of a more traditional 2D look. When placed at the bottom, the dock does retain its 3D appearance; however, a smart hacker has already found out that via a single command in the terminal, you can give the bottom dock the same 2D appearance. In other words, everybody who criticised the new dock (including yours truly): rejoice!
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Apple Reports a Stellar Quarter

Apple 48 Comments
Apple sold 1.1 million iPhones during its fourth quarter, the company said in its results statement on Monday. This brought total sales of the iPhone to 1.39 million since its launch and pushed the company's revenue to USD 6.22m (GBP 3.04m) for the quarter. The good news was not solely to do with the iPhone, however, as the company also reported shipping 2.1 million Mac computers, representing 34 percent growth over the fourth quarter of 2006. Apple 'exceeded the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments by 400,000', the company said in the statement. Additionally, News.com tries to look beyond the marketing.
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Experimental ‘Functional’ Language Emerges from Microsoft Research

General Development 47 Comments
Are the C programming language and its object-oriented offspring - C++, C#, Objective-C - still well-suited to the requirements of multithreaded, network-oriented computing environments today? That's the question on the minds of engineers at Microsoft Research, whose latest programming language is today being officially moved off the back burner. The F# language has received the company's official blessing.
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AMD 8.42 Linux Driver Brings Fixes, Aiglx

  Submitted by pixelnate 3D 50 Comments
Ati AMD has released a new version of its graphics drivers that fix some long overdue bugs. "Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL!"
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FreeBSD 7.0 Beta 1 Released

  Submitted by Oliver FreeBSD 25 Comments
FeeBSD 7.0-beta1 has been released, with 6.3-beta1 on its way. "We have entered the final phases of the FreeBSD-7.0 Release cycle which also means the beginning of the FreeBSD-6.3 Release cycle. Because the people who support the ports for FreeBSD also need to go through a freeze cycle as part of releases we had decided to combine the two releases to try and minimize the impact on the ports maintainers."
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‘Driver Updates Causing Vista to Deactivate’

  Submitted by Dan Warne Windows 72 Comments
"After weeks of gruelling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA - something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation. Put simply, your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into 'reduced functionality' mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour. You'll then need to reapply to Microsoft to get a new activation code. How can this crazy situation occur? Read on for the sorry tale."
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Fedora 8 Renews Tradition of Innovations

  Submitted by Rahul Fedora Core 29 Comments
"Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny. By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions."
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Sun Scrapping Mobile Java, Moving Devices to Standard Java

Java 31 Comments
Sun's starting to phase out mobile Java that's been the standard on cellphones and other small devices in favor of their standard edition, which are made for PCs everywhere. Sun VP James Gosling's reasoning for shifting everyone over to Java Standard Edition is because 'cellphones and TV set-top boxes are growing up', meaning they're getting enough processing power to handle all the demands of full-featured Java.
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Thoughts on ‘MinWin’, Windows 7, and Virtualisation

Windows 72 Comments
Earlier today, OSNews ran a story on a presentation held by Microsoft's Eric Traut, the man responsible for the 200 or so kernel and virtualisation engineers working at the company. Eric Traut is also the man who wrote the binary translation engine for in the earlier PowerPC versions of VirtualPC (interestingly, this engine is now used to run XBox 1 games on the XBox 360 ) - in other words, he knows what he is talking about when it comes to kernel engineering and virtualisation. His presentation was a very interesting thing to watch, and it offered a little bit more insight into Windows 7, the codename for the successor to Windows Vista, planned for 2010.
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A History of the Amiga, Part 4: Enter Commodore

Amiga & AROS 15 Comments
Ars Technica has published part four in their series on the history of the Amiga, starting with Amiga being bought by Commodore. "One hugely positive benefit about being owned by a large computer company was that the Amiga team no longer (for the moment, anyway) had to worry about money. The team was moved 10 miles to a spacious, rented facility in Los Gatos, California. They could afford to hire more engineers, and the software development team went from having 10 people sharing a single Sage workstation to everyone having their own SUN on their desk."
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Core of ‘Windows 7’ Taking Shape: Meet the ‘MinWin’ Kernel

  Submitted by Flatland_Spider Windows 49 Comments
While newly minted Windows head Steven Sinofsky continues to play his cards close to his chest, we're seeing signs that Microsoft is rethinking its monolithic approach to not only the mass-market Windows operating system but the entire family of Windows products from servers down to CE-based embedded devices. First up is a streamlined microkernel codenamed MinWin, around which a re-engineered Windows line will be built. Described as 'the Windows 7 source-code base', in reference to the successor to Windows Vista which is slated for a 2010 release, MinWin strips back the current NT-based kernel to the barest of bare metal. Ars Technica has more, including a one hour video presentation about MinWin. Sassy quote of the day by Microsoft kernel engineer Eric Traut: "A lot of people think of Windows as this really large bloated operating system, and that may be a fair characterisation, I have to admit." My take: Maybe this will be closer to reality after all?
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How to Replace Windows Completely with Ubuntu

  Submitted by Dan Warne Ubuntu 85 Comments
APCMag has a lenghty article on switching from Windows to Ubuntu. "When I was first given this task I had to sit and blink a few times, if for nothing else than dramatic pause. I'm a self-confessed Linux nut, as some of you may know, but even I'm cautious to do away with Windows completely. There's a reason I have a dual-boot Windows and Linux machine. Several of them, in fact. But have I just been conditioned into using Windows because of past experience, or applications, or file formats, or the myriad other reasons that make Windows a comfort zone because it's all so familiar?"
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Classic AmigaOS 4.0 To Ship on November 30th

  Submitted by SamuraiCrow Amiga & AROS 34 Comments
AmigaOS 4.0 for classic Amigas will go on sale November 30th (yes, this year). From the AmigaWorld.net news page: "On November 30 AmigaOS4 will ship for Classic Amigas. Hyperion Entertainment VOF made the announcement at the AmiWest banquet. The following will be included in the package: CD-ROM with AmigaOS4, one floppy disk to boot your Amiga (no pre-installed OS will be needed), and a manual."
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GNU Classpath 0.96, IcedTea 1.4 Released

  Submitted by Mark Wielaard Java 8 Comments
GNU Classpath 0.96 "Staying Alive!" and IcedTea 1.4 just got released. GNU Classpath is slowly turning into a bootstrapping platform for IcedTea/OpenJDK by providing the necessary free software plugs that are missing from Sun's OpenJDK to provide various GNU/Linux distributions with the fully free GPLed IcedTea Java platform implementation that will be in the Fedora (Werewolf), Debian, and Ubuntu (Gutsy) releases.
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NetBSD 4.0 RC3 Released

  Submitted by ranosz NetBSD 2 Comments
NetBSD 4.0 RC3 has been released. "On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am happy to announce the availability of NetBSD 4.0 Release Candidate 3. The list of changes from the 3.0 release is available in the release notes. This release candidate has several bug fixes and other changes since the previous release candidate."
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SELinux Sparks Tussle Over Linux Security Model

  Submitted by irbis Linux 37 Comments
"Should Security Enhanced Linux be designated as the sole security framework for Linux? While most security specialists would agree on the high quality of SELinux, proponents are arguing this framework is the only one that should be needed for the open-source operating system kernel. In fact, it would eliminate the need for the Linux Security Module, an open platform for outsider developers to build their own security frameworks for Linux. And this idea has raised the ire of Linux keeper Linus Torvalds."
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