Monthly Archive:: May 2009

"The Serial ATA International Organization today, made the third-generation SATA interface official. The new interface provides a 6 Gbps high-speed serial data connection between the system and most of today's data storage devices such as hard drives, solid-state drives, optical drives, and enterprise tape drives. The interface also provides connectivity to external storage devices in its eSATA port variant. It is 100% backwards compatible with devices that support the SATA 150 MB/s and SATA II 300 MB/s standards."

FreeBSD's jails technology received an interesting new feature. "Add hierarchical jails. A jail may further virtualize its environment by creating a child jail, which is visible to that jail and to any parent jails. Child jails may be restricted more than their parents, but never less. Jail names reflect this hierarchy, being MIB-style dot-separated strings."

StreamOS 2.0-RC1 has been released. "I've just released first release candidate of 0.21. It's connected with two final improvements: new locking subsystem, that seems to work great, and new keys handler, that doesn't eat CPU anymore, which has made StreamOS faster and more responsive." StreamOS is 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using Free Pascal Compiler.

The Genode project has released the version 9.05 of their operating-system framework. The highlights as detailed in the release notes are the support of the OKL4 kernel as base platform, the introduction of basic USB support, the integration of Qt4 into the main-line source tree, and 64-bit support.

Getting Mac OS X up and running on a computer without an Apple label has always been a bit of a hassle. You needed customised Mac OS X disks, updates would ruin all your hard work, and there was lots of fiddling with EFI and the likes. Ever since the release of boot-132, this is no longer the case. Read on for how setting up a "Hack"intosh really is as easy as 1, 3, 2.

The news has been out for a few hours already, but we were waiting for some official documentation and sources until we would publish it: Psystar, the Macintosh "clone" maker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Apparently, the small company has a debt of USD 259000. The filing was made on a voluntary basis, and according to Psystar the financial troubles arise from the economic downturn.

Eric Paris, a SELinux developer, has announced today a new SELinux feature: "Dan and I (mostly Dan) have started to play with using SELinux to confine random untrusted binaries. The program is called 'sandbox.' The idea is to allow administrators to lock down tightly untrusted applications in a sandbox where they can not use the network and open/create any file that is not handed to the process. Can be used to protect a system while allowing it to run some untrusted binary."

Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators.

I recently started using Git for my local revision control. Since I spend about 90% of my coding time inside the Vim editor, I went looking for a plugin that would make Vim play nice with Git. In this article I present two different vim plugins and explore their feature-set via screenshots.

The geek world might be all over Windows 7, and the rest of the world might be sticking to Windows XP for now, but there is also this Windows Vista operating system lingering around. Microsoft has just released the final version of the second service pack for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Over the years, we've occasionally run an "Ask OSNews" feature, wherein a reader asks us a question and we answer it publicly. Lately I've really been enjoying Slate's Dear Prudence advice column and the ever-interesting Straight Dope, and I thought we should see if we can get more OSNews readers to submit questions, and turn Ask OSNews into a more-regular thing. If your question falls outside of our domain expertise, we'll try to track down an expert to help out. And of course, our responses will always be supplemented by further advice from OSNews readers in the comments. Questions are welcome on any topic ranging from OSes and computing to science and geek culture. Contact us with your questions. (Please include "Ask OSNews" in the subject). Today's question is from a young student in Hungary who's seduced by the faraway siren song of Apple's marketing and wonders, "should I switch?"

Netbooks are really becoming a part of the market where all sorts of companies are trying out new things. For instance, earlier this week, we had a review of a MIPS-based Loongson-2 netbook from China, last Monday we reported on Acer implementing a Vmedia drive into a netbook, a while back we had a multitouch LCD touchpad netbook, and we've had more. Now we have one that uses an x86 SoC that doesn't come from AMD/Intel/VIA, and can run on... AA batteries.

Even though it was a relatively easy-going week when it comes to the news, we still had some interesting items worth revisiting. A company called Vmedia is trying to push a video version of MiniDisc, Apple did an epic Java fail, Google released Chrome 2.0, and more.

Mid-April, the four founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to breaching copyright law; they aided in breaching copyright of 33 files. As a result, they were sentenced to one year in jail and a 2.75 million EUR fine. However, it was quickly revealed that the judge in the case was heavily biased, and ever since then there's been a search for a judge who is actually not involved with any pro-copyright groups or with the lawyers working for the entertainment industry in this case. Turns out that's actually kind of hard.