I haven't kept this as up to date as I'd like but the stuff that is here is good to know. I'm going to modify it so other people can add sections to it and it can be a living document, but until then this is all you get.
Now this is interesting news that hit my inbox at 2:22 AM (don't ask). It seems like the concept of selling Mac clones is more lucrative than many have anticipated, as I've just been informed via email that the German PearC has expanded its business into the BeNeLux (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg) and France. Together with the news that Psystar emerged from chapter 11, it looks like the market for Mac clones is more lucrative than many of us had imagined.
While I'm still chipping away at my AmigaOS 4.1/sam440ep review (try writing a thesis and a large review at the same time), Cloanto released AmigaForever 2009. AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.
There haven't been too many iPhone exploits, it seems, despite the popularity of said devices. However, Charlie Miller, a security researcher, recently uncovered a vulnerability in the iPhone OS that could possibly "allow an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network. The malicious code could include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet." Scary, isn't it? They say it's not very likely that others will exploit it even on a small scale before Apple issues the patch, but having a hole like that just sitting there makes me glad right now that I don't own an iPhone.
The folks over at Phoronix had an interesting interview with Linux game porter, Frank Earl. Despite the apparent decline in PC gaming, Earl has worked for Linux Game Publishing for several years and was seeking input from the community at large for game suggestions at Phoronix. He's also done work independently on porting various software over from Windows. The interview covers work that Earl has done, difficulties that arise in porting commercial games to Linux, successes they've had, his views on Linux in general, and his thoughts on the future of gaming in Linux.
Chances are that you've already heard of and even visited Bing, Microsoft's new search offering
launched earlier in June, replacing the Live search of yesterday. It's
new, shiny, and has pretty pictures, but does it really have much
effect on the market? There have been those headlines claiming it's
"taken a bite out of Google," but, looking
at the statistics, it hasn't really affected the search industry
at all.
Whenever we talk about Mac clone makers such as Psystar, we all more or less accept as a fact that Apple is selling copies of its Mac OS X operating system at a price lower than it would have been if Apple did not have a hardware business. Even though we treat this statement as fact - recently, I've been wondering: where is the proof? Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...
The Windows 7 pricing scheme thing isn't over just yet. Microsoft announced the prices for Windows 7 last week, including a limited offer with lower prices and all that. There was no mention of a family pack, but a little digging in the latest leaked build suggests that yes, there's going to be a family pack of Windows Home Premium.
Well, it really seems as if Psystar is committed to continue its business, no matter what. The company entered chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, and many wondered if this meant the end of the clone maker and the legal case between Apple and Psystar. Well, today the clone maker announced that it is emerging from chapter 11, and while they're at it, they also introduce a new "Mac".
"Due to now living in a KMS-enabled world, at least on the Intel and ATI side (the NVIDIA side is still slowly but surely coming via Nouveau), it's rather easy to get the X Server running without any special rights. Intel's Jesse Barnes explains on the X.Org mailing list that only a small patch is needed for the X Server and then a trivial one to the Direct Rendering Manager in the kernel."
We here at OSNews have taken somewhat of an interest in the new HTML5 video and audio tags, which should - some day - make embedding audio and video material into web pages as easy and straightforward as embedding images, allowing the web to finally remove the shackles of dreadful Flash video. Sadly, the problem with these new tags are the codecs; as it turns out, browser makers have not reached an agreement about what codecs to choose for video, with mostly Apple throwing a spanner in the works, and Microsoft shining in absence.
The FAT file system is the file system used by MS-DOS and earlier versions of Windows. It's a relatively simple and straightforward file system, supported by just about any operating system, making it the favoured file system on memory cards and the like. FAT is an ECMA and ISO standard, but these only apply for FAT12 and FAT16 without support for long file names, and therein lies a problem.
Whenever I use KDE, the part I dislike the most is the rendering engine used by Konqueror, called KHTML. KHTML just doesn't render pages as smooth and as well as Gecko and the KHTML fork WebKit, up to a point where I find Konqueror unusable as a web browser. However, work is underway to replace KHTML in Konqueror with WebKit, but according to KDE developer Adam Treat, this is a futile effort: Konqueror is too KHTML API specific.
Slackware 13.0 RC1 has been released. Or tagged. Or whatever you'd call it in the Slackware world. "The TODO isn't entirely empty here, but it's pretty much down to minor nits, and so we're going to call this release candidate #1 and (mostly) freeze further updates unless they happen to fix problems. Regarding the kernel, 2.6.29.x has been well tested with this userspace and seems like the best choice to ship for production use. Perhaps we can put something else (at least source and configs) in /testing, though."
Today's a slow news day, so I thought it would be a good day to bring up an idea I've been incubating. I've been contemplating launching an OSNews-like site on the topic of Enterprise Computing. Obviously, OSNews covers the OS-related aspects of heavy-duty business, scientific, and academic computing already, and sometimes news on databases, app servers, cloud computing and other related topics too, but a lot of the kind of news that is useful to enterprise IT people falls outside of OSNews' purview, and it's appropriate to keep it that way. But I think that the enterprise IT world could use an OSNews-like site to aggregate and examine the latest news in that sphere. So my question to you, dear OSNews readers, is this: Do you agree? Would you be interested in reading and participating in a site on that topic? Would you be interested in being involved? If so, I'd like to recruit a few editors to help me launch it. Read on for more details. Update: Are there any native Korean speakers who read OSNews? If you are one, and you'd be willing to help me out with a short project, please contact me. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...
The story around The Pirate Bay acquisition seems to be developing fast. The torrent search engine was bought by Global Gaming Factory yesterday, and they promised to build a legal P2P distribution network where content providers and copyright holders get compensated. In an exclusive interview with the BBC, GGF's Hans Pandeya detailed the business plan they have in mind for TPB.
Miod Vallat (miod@) announced some days ago on the sgi@ mailing list that the OpenBSD Operating System does now run on SGI / Silicon Graphics Fuel, Octane and Origin 200.
Owners of this kind of exotic hardware may want to give it a try.
Miod Vallat (miod@) has tagged 4.6-BETA. Snapshots should be available soon for testing, check the mirrors for availability. Read below for the full commit message:
Anders Magnusson (ragge@) has been quietly hacking on pcc and has committed AMD64 support which is in need of testing. As always, please report any bugs in the pcc bug database. The best bug reports are of the form "this particular code snippet doesn't compile" or "this expression generates wrong the assembler output".
My sincere thanks to the nearly 75 donors who help fund this work. Please consider helping keep Anders going with a donation towards this work to produce a 1.0 release of this BSD-licensed compiler.
Am 16.09 und 17.09.2006 findet in Essen der LinuxTag Essen, Com2Linux, statt. Auch hier wird allBSD wieder zugegen sein um die BSD-Systeme zu präsentieren. Mehr Informationen finden Sie hier.
Das allBSD Projekt hat neue Flyer rund um die BSDs erstellt und stellt diese als PDF Dokument zum download bereit. Auf dem Linuxtag 2006 in Wiesbaden werden diese Flyer auf dem BSD-Stand ausgeteilt werden.
Der LinuxTag berichtet in einer News auch über das Engagement der BSDs auf dem diesjährigen Linuxtag.
In der neusten Ausgabe des freeX Magazins (http://www.freex-online.de/) wird über das allBSD Projekt berichtet. Desweiteren gibt es in dieser Ausgabe eine Reihe weiterer BSD-Artikel:
- FreeBSD auf dem IBM-Blade Center - DSL Multihoming mit NetBSD - Bluetooth unter FreeBSD - Lazarus und FreeBSD
Seite heute steht das Vortragsprogramm für den LinuxTag 2006 fest. Am Freitag dem 05.05.2006 wird es in Saal 6.2 den ganzen Tag Vorträge über BSD geben. Mehr Informationen zu den Vorträgen entnehmen Sie bitte hier und hier.
allBSD ist auf der CeBIT von 12.-15.März 2006 im Bereich LinuxPark und teilt sich den Stand mit anderen Open Source Projekten. Siehe hierzu: http://www.allbsd.de/events/cebit/index.html
Dru Lavigne, bekannt durch ihre Kolumnen bei O´Reilly, das Buch "BSD Hacks" und Ihr Engagement für eine BSD-Zertifizierung, hat ein online Diskussion mit Daniel Seuffert, Wilhelm Bühler und Axel S. Gruner geführt. Dabei geht es um die Ambitionen von allBSD.de, was der Slogan "push it, dont hype" zu bedeuten hat und wie man allBSD unterstützen kann.
Jürgen Dankoweit ist nun auch Mitglied bei allBSD.de. Er hat in der Vergangenheit viele FreeBSD Flyern erstellt und arbeitet nun aktiv bei allBSD.de mit.
Seit heute haben Sie die Möglichkeit in Ihren Kalender die hier angekündigten Events automatisch eintragen zu lassen. Hier können Sie die ICS-Datei abonnieren.
allbsd-announce - als Ankündigungsliste (Newsletter) allbsd-events - zur internen Organisation von Events (öffentlich) allbsd-misc - für sonstige Themen rund um allBSD.de (öffentlich)
Zur Bündelung der Aktivitäten zum Cebit-Stand 2006 der BSD-Projekte geht die Domain allBSD.de online. Geplant ist, bis Weihnachten 2006 eine Mailinglliste und ein Grundgerüst der Webseiten zu BSD aufzusetzen.
