General Development Archive

FOSDEM Conference Feb 8-9, Brussels, Belgium

David Adams 2002-12-18 General Development 4 Comments

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting is coming soon, and in preparation, the organizers have published interviews with some of the participants: David Faure for KDE and Michael Meeks for GNOME.

Why Linux Binaries are not as Easy to Handle?

Guest post by Juan Linietsky 2002-12-16 General Development 127 Comments

Have you ever wondered why in other Operating Systems such as Windows, MacOS or even BeOS installing software is so easy compared to Linux? In such OSes you can simply download and decompress a file or run an installer process which will easily walk you through the process.

Get a Taste of Bochs 2.0

Eugenia Loli 2002-12-04 General Development 23 Comments

Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.

Programming Bits: C# Data Types

Eugenia Loli 2002-12-04 General Development 1 Comment

"In my previous article, I introduced the C# programming language and explained how it works in the context of the Mono environment, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. I will now go on to some details on the data types supported by the C# programming language." Read the second article at LinuxGazette. Another development article ("Writing Portable Code") is here.

Visual Studio .Net Enters Final Beta Phase

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-26 General Development 3 Comments

Microsoft Corp. last week announced the final beta of its Visual Studio .Net 2003 product -formerly known by the code name Everett- and released its .Net Compact Framework. New features include: Availability of .Net Compact Framework, Improved scalability with support for up to 32 processors, Improved performance, Support for new Web services specifications: WS-Security, WS-Routing and WS-Attachments, 98 percent conformance with the International Organization for Standardization's C++ standard, Integration of Visual J#.

Intel Releases Version 7.0 Compiler Suite

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-24 General Development 19 Comments

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

ADR Software Releases NTFS Reader for DOS as a Freeware

Submitted by NTFS.com 2002-11-24 General Development 15 Comments

Active Data Recovery Software has released the NTFS Reader for DOS, a DOS-interfaced freeware application for reading NTFS volumes from MS-DOS or Windows 9x environments.

Moving from Windows to Linux with Kylix 3

Submitted by Anonymous 2002-11-22 General Development 17 Comments

One of the great things about using tools and databases such as Borland Delphi 7 Studio and IBM DB2 Universal Database is that moving between platforms is only a matter of a few changes and a recompile. This article shows how to move a functional application from a Delphi 7 application running on Microsoft Windows to a Linux application using Borland Kylix 3. This article also goes over DB2 on Linux and minor source code changes.

Advanced filesystem implementor’s guide, Part 13

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-21 General Development 4 Comments

In the Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Daniel Robbins shows you how to use the latest filesystem technologies in Linux 2.4. In this conclusion to the AFIG series, Daniel continues his discussion of the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, or EVMS. He shows you how to use evmsn to take a new hard drive, partition it, and create LVM volumes on it. Along the way, he fills you in on important EVMS concepts that you'll find essential as you continue your exploration of this powerful technology.

GCC 3.2.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-20 General Development 13 Comments

The GCC 3.2.1 release is to provide a stable platform for OS distributors to use building their next OS releases. A primary objective was to stabilize the C++ ABI.

Programming and Other Articles at InformIT

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-19 General Development No Comments

Some interesting programming and other articles are to be found this way round at InformIT. Read more for a list of the articles (free registration required).

The Infrastructure and Advances in ReiserFS 4

Submitted by Rayiner Hashem 2002-11-19 General Development 19 Comments

This is an informative article about the upcoming Reiser4 filesystem. It covers a lot of the performance improvements in Reiser4 along with a lot of ideas about a database filesystem.

Introducing ColorForth

Submitted by bland est 2002-11-12 General Development 27 Comments

Forth has been a recognized programming language since the 1970's. ColorForth is a redesign of this classic language for the 21st century. It also draws upon a 20-year evolution of minimal instruction-set microprocessors. Now implemented on modern PCs, it runs stand-alone without an operating system. Applications are recompiled from source with a simple optimizing compiler.

Single-User Subversion

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-06 General Development 16 Comments

"Subversion is an open source revision control system, similar in purpose to the well-known, widely deployed, and aging CVS. It is designed to provide state-of-the-art versioning, built from modern technologies. Subversion is still in development and has not reached version 1.0 yet. However, it's pretty stable and you can use it right now." Read the article at OnLamp.

Review: Kylix 3 has Plenty of Programming Power

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-05 General Development 15 Comments

"It is not as if I am new to Kylix. I am a Delphi programmer since version 1, and I always keep my C++ skills up. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the release of Borland's Kylix 3, the Rapid Application Development environment for Linux that includes both Delphi language and C++ IDE's (integrated development environment). The code produced with Kylix can be recompiled with minimal changes under Microsoft Windows using either Delphi for Windows version 6 or greater, or C++ Builder version 6 or greater." Read the review at NewsForge.

Developing Applications for Gnome with Python, Part 3

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-04 General Development 9 Comments

This series of articles is specially written for newbie programmers using Gnome and GNU/Linux. Python, the chosen language for development, avoids the usual overhead of compiled languages like C. Read it at LinuxFocus.org. Previous articles in the series: first article, second article.

Advanced Filesystem Implementor’s Guide, Part 12

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-31 General Development 2 Comments

In this article, Daniel Robbins introduces the Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) for Linux. He explains what EVMS is, why it is so desperately needed, and why it will very likely transform the way storage is managed on Linux systems.

Poll: Can you Use Programming Languages?

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-30 General Development 85 Comments

Here is a poll we put together to better understand the nature of the OSNews readers. Please tell us about the level of experience you got with programming.

The /opt and /usr Issue Revisited

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-23 General Development 29 Comments

"I suppose it's a losing battle, but it's one worth fighting, anyway. What makes me think of it is a thread I noticed on the freedesktop.org mailing list. In that thread, Andreas Pour, with whom I do not agree about much, defends obvious common sense against what over the last couple of years has been a growing onslaught. He's absolutely right, but that isn't always enough." Read it at LinuxAndMain.

Borland’s Bird’s Eye View

Submitted by rajan r 2002-10-19 General Development 7 Comments

In this second and final part of my interview with Ted Shelton, Borland's chief strategy officer, Shelton focuses on Microsoft .Net's support for multiple languages and reveals a hidden .Net stumbling block. First part here.