Monthly Archive:: May 2009

Sun Shareholders Sue to Block Oracle Acquisition

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 Oracle and SUN 11 Comments

Sun Microsystems shareholders have filed three separate class action lawsuits to block a $7.4 billion acquisition by Oracle, the company revealed in a 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lawsuits allege Sun's board didn't live up to its fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders when it accepted Oracle's acquisition offer, saying "the consideration offered in the proposed transaction is unfair and inadequate."

Industrial-Strength Python Testing Frameworks

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 General Development 3 Comments

The recent emergence of industrial-strength Python testing frameworks means that Python tests are being written more succinctly, more uniformly, and with better reporting of results than ever before. Adopting one of the new generation of Python testing frameworks will provide concise idioms and uniform testing techniques that, in the past, every Python project had to supply for itself.

Guest post by Rahul 2009-05-08 Fedora Core 21 Comments

Red Hat, which started the HAL project many years ago, has deprecated it in favor of a new initiative called DeviceKit. David Zeuthen, primary developer of DeviceKit, has posted on his blog about the work done by the Red Hat Desktop team in Fedora 11 for improving the storage layer in GNOME by taking advantage of DeviceKit. This includes desktop notification if your hard disk is failing, a desktop utility to handle RAID and LVM storage, a replacement for the venerable gfloppy, and many others. Look at his blog for a number of screenshots showing the details. "The GNOME 2.26 release in Fedora 11 will ship with a completely different stack for handling storage devices. The plan is to land all this work in the upstream GNOME 2.28 release and most of that work is done already."

Oracle To Invest in SPARC, Wants to Be Like Apple, Cisco

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-08 Oracle and SUN 28 Comments

Ever since news got out that Oracle snapped up Sun Microsystems, a big question mark has been hanging over Sun's SPARC business. Would Oracle kill it off? Sell it? Or would they actually invest in creating a top-to-bottom hardware+software stack, like Apple and Cisco? Oracle's CEO has given the answer. And yes, that's a new category icon up there.

Interview: PiTiVi Video Editor Maintainer Edward Hervey

Submitted by Christian Schaller 2009-05-08 Multimedia, AV 5 Comments

In this interview with Edward Hervey, the PiTiVi maintainer, GNOMEDesktop.org talks about the history of the project, its current status, and plans going forward. PiTiVi aims at being the premier open source video editing solution and with current developments that seems to be within reach.

FreeBSD Status Report January-March 2009

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2009-05-08 FreeBSD 20 Comments

After having released FreeBSD 7.2 just a few days ago, the FreeBSD project now sends out a new quarterly status report, with information about development projects in progress. This report contains news on Clang replacing GCC, VirtualBox improvements, upcoming support for an NVIDIA 64-bit driver, some DTrace news, and more.

Submitted by lemur2 2009-05-08 KDE 36 Comments

It slipped by us, but the KDE team has released another minor bugfix release of KDE 4.2, version 4.2.3, a few days ago. Being a bugfix release, there are few user-visible changes, but still, there are a few things that stand out. "Online IMAP filtering in KMail has been fixed, KMail's system tray icon now reacts to changes to folder properties and updates the number of emails shown there automatically, and bugfixes, performance improvements and optimization in KHTML - painting and interoperability with web standards has been further improved."

Submitted by lemur2 2009-05-08 Office 38 Comments

OpenOffice.org 3.1 has been released. "The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the general availability of OpenOffice.org 3.1, a significant upgrade to the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. Since OpenOffice.org 3.0 was launched last October, over 60 million downloads have been recorded from the OpenOffice.org website alone. Released in more than 90 languages and available as a free download on all major computing platforms, OpenOffice.org 3.1 looks set to break these records." There's a guide to new features, and you can download OpenOffice.org 3.1 here.

Guest post by Rahul 2009-05-08 Multimedia, AV 11 Comments

Chris Montgomery, otherwise known as Monty, is the founder of Xiph.org foundation and creator of the Ogg container format. He has been sponsored by Red Hat for several years to improve the codec quality of Theora and the next generation version, called Thusnelda, is already proving to be better than H264 as bitrate increases. Monty has posted some test results demonstrating the improvements. Chris Blizzard from Mozilla Foundation has some updates as well.

Warp Drive: Might Actually Not Be Impossible

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 Geek stuff 38 Comments

Today, the new Star Trek film has seen its official premiere here in The Netherlands tonight, and in honour of that, I figured an article on Space.com about the possibility of faster-than-light travel would make a good fit on OSNews. The article is quite technical, so bear with me on this one. I hope I get everything right.

Scripting the Vim Editor with Vimscript

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 General Development 2 Comments

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

An Early Look at What’s Coming in PHP v6

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 Internet 8 Comments

In this article, learn about the new PHP V6 features in detail. Learn how it is easier to use, more secure, and more suitable for internationalization. New PHP V6 features include improved support for Unicode, clean-up of several functions, improved extensions, engine additions, changes to OO functions, and PHP additions.

Teacup, Meet Storm, pt. II: XPM and Intel Support

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 Windows 16 Comments

Windows XP Mode, the virtualisation tool currently in beta for Windows 7, only works on processors with virtualisation extensions, known as AMD-V and Intel VT-x. Microsoft made this clear from the get-go, but still various news websites regurgitated it as "news" yesterday that some Intel processors do not support XPM. Twenty-four hours down the road, and Intel had a few things to say about this.

Behind the Scenes at an iPhone Development House

Submitted by caffeine deprived 2009-05-07 Apple No Comments

Collect3 is an Australian iPhone development house that has released a number of successful utilities sold in the App Store. In this lengthy interview two of the founders discuss the pitfalls iPhone developers face and how they managed to find success in the increasingly crowded app store. They also discuss Collect3's sister company, Revolutionary Concepts, which is designed to be a collective to aid aspiring iPhone devs with marketing, know-how and other support.

Submitted by poundsmack 2009-05-07 .NET 9 Comments

"Microsoft is turning the source code for its embedded .Net Micro Framework over to the community and slowly withdrawing from that business, company officials are confirming. On the rumored list of teams most heavily impacted by second wave of Microsoft layoffs announced on May 5 was the .Net Micro Framework team - as well as the related MSN Direct unit. Indeed, both groups were affected, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed on May 6."

Chrome Users Most Up to Date, Firefox Second

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-07 Internet 72 Comments

When Google released the first version of its Chrome web browser, many eyebrows were raised over the fact that it updated itself automatically and silently, in the background, without user intervention or even so much as a notice. As it turns out, this has been a brilliant move by Google, as Chrome users are the most likely to have up-to-date installations of their browser, followed at a respectable distance by Firefox users. Safari and Opera trail behind significantly.

SCO: Like an Insect that Will Not Die

weildish 2009-05-07 Legal 23 Comments

Remember SCO? They just don't know when to quit, do they? "The Department of Justice's Trustee program, which has finally had enough of SCO's stalling tactics and failed reorganization attempts, has filed a motion to transition the company to Chapter 7. SCO CEO Darl McBride says that the company will oppose the motion and will present a new reorg plan to the court."

Android 1.5: UK Now, US Soon

weildish 2009-05-07 Wireless 7 Comments

For users in the United Kingdom, the Cupcake update has already started rolling and will continue to throughout the month. Users in the United States will have to wait until late next week for the updates to begin rolling, but patience is, after all, a virtue. New features include Picasa and YouTube uploads directly from one's phone, and that's spiffy. Cupcakes are quite tasty, so I think.

Amazon Launches Kindle DX, Targets Textbooks, Newspapers

Thom Holwerda 2009-05-06 Wireless 38 Comments

With the success of the Kindle I and Kindle II still fresh in its memory, Amazon decided to take its line of e-ink digital ebook readers to the next level with the newly announced Kindle DX. The Kindle DX is basically a supersized Kindle II, but it comes with a number of interesting improvements.

Submitted by diegocg 2009-05-06 Debian 43 Comments

Via LWN, we found a blog post of a Debian maintainer which announces a new package: EGLIBC, a compatible reimplementation of the GNU glibc which "which will soon replace the GNU C Library". Apparently the primary reason is the sadly famous bad maintainership aptitude of Ulrich Drepper, the main libc maintainer.