Wine 0.9.9 Released

Wine 0.9.9 Released: "This is release 0.9.9 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on UNIX. New features include better web browser support, recursive directory change notifications, debugger improvements, and lots of other bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements."

OpenSUSE Project News

The OpenSUSE project has announced the development version SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta 6. Also, the revised released schedule for SUSE Linux 10.1 and the start of the SUSE Linux 10.2 schedule with eight months development have been posted. The project attended FOSDEM 2006 and the slides of the talks given there are now online (audio/video recordings will follow soon). Last but not least the preview phase of the openSUSE Build Service has started.

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Cut-Down KDE

The ModdingDen has an interview with the lead developer of SimpleKDE, a cut-down, lightweight version of KDE. "The main reason is that we find KDE too cluttered and too bloated; and we want something faster, more simplistic and easier to use. Honestly, I'm pretty happy with my own KDE installation, but I especially observe beginners having difficulty in adapting themselves to it." The interview dates 9th January 2006, but since we never covered SimpleKDE on OSNews, it's interesting nonetheless. Read more about SimpleKDE at their website. And yes, boys and girls, there are screenshots too.

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Microsoft will have Google licked in 6 months

I seem to remember not too long ago Microsoft claiming that the new MSN Search was going to mop the floors with Google. Whether or not I just imagined that, Microsoft is playing the same tune today. Reuters reports that Microsoft expects to "be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google" in six months time with the launch of a new search engine. They claim the new search engine will do more than just fetch URLs, pulling relevant data from around the web like real estate and restaurant listings instead of just links. That sounds familiar. While Microsoft's dream of having Google beat in six months seem, to put it kindly, a little fanciful—a year or two and anything could happen, but six months?—I have no doubt that they're up to something interesting and that Google won't spend the intervening time resting on its laurels.

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Windows Vista to support upgrades on the fly

With six separate versions of Windows Vista on the way, Microsoft has a marketing challenge on its hands. How will the company properly inform users as to which versions support which features? One part of the plan is now becoming clear: all four "consumer" versions of the OS will be available to users even after installation. How? They'll all be available for "instant online upgrade" once Windows Vista is installed.

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Unix Road Map

"UNIX and Windows data-center market share remain neck-and-neck, according to most analysts, but many in IT perceive UNIX and Linux innovation as slowing to a crawl. We interviewed representatives from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems who were eager to challenge that perception by highlighting areas in which their UNIX OSs are breaking new ground."

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Apple Security Fix Closes Mail, iChat, Safari Holes

Apple on Wednesday released Security Update 2006-001, available for download through Software Update system preference pane and from Apple's Downloads Web page. The update addresses a recently reported exploit that left Safari users vulnerable to malicious shell scripts, corrects a vulnerability in Apple's Mail software, and also changes the way iChat handles file transfers to help prevent the Leap-A malware.

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SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor's button tells you if the site you've surfed to is bad, and backs up its rating with hard facts. It also checks every site found in a Google, Yahoo! or MSN search and overlays its rating icons on the results. Following its recommendations will help you avoid spam, spyware, and pop-ups.

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GNOME 2.14.0-RC Released

Significant improvements in GNOME 2.14 have lead to noticable speed-ups throughout the desktop. The speed of font rendering has been improved and a new memory allocator called GSlice, which is in many ways similar to the slab allocator in the Linux kernel offer significant performance increases throughout GNOME. Specific identified slow points in GNOME such as logging in have also been optimised by our crack team of speed kings.

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Release Announcement: Gentoo Linux 2006

The Gentoo Release Engineering team proudly announces the release of Gentoo Linux 2006.0. Gentoo Linux 2006.0, the first release in the 2006 series, represents improvements across many architectures since the 2005.1 release.

Major highlights in the release include KDE 3.4.3, GNOME 2.12.2, XFCE 4.2.2, GCC 3.4.4 and a 2.6.15 kernel. This is also the first release with the Gentoo Linux Installer officially debuting on the x86 LiveCD, which will fully replace the Universal and PackageCD set. The LiveCD also features a fully-fledged Gnome environment. Later releases will include KDE support as well as a new LiveDVD.

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OS X Rosetta Performance Benchmark

Geekpatrol benchmarks Rosetta performance, and concludes: "I'm impressed with Rosetta; Geekbench performance running under Rosetta is 40% to 80% of what it is running natively. Plus, running Geekbench under Rosetta is comparable to running Geekbench natively on a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz (our baseline system), at least in the single-threaded tests."

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Adobe Production Studio

Though there a few rough edges, Adobe Production Studio is an affordable, stable production suite with outstanding functionality and usability.

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Why windows vista wont suck

"There's a lot of confusion about Windows Vista these days. Many online discussion forums have a great number of users who express no desire to upgrade to Vista. Sure, we've all seen the screenshots and maybe a video or two of Vista in action, but for many it only seems like new tricks for an old dog. Yeah, it's got some fancy 3D effects in the interface, but OS X has been doing that for years now, and it's still Windows underneath, right? The sentiment seems to be that Vista is another Windows ME. Perhaps part of the problem is that people just don't know what Vista has in store for them."

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Software to make your media center 'listen'

No one to talk to when you get home from work? One Voice Technologies has a technological solution.

Its One Voice software add-on for Windows XP Media Center is designed to allow users to control their TV, stereo and computer via verbal commands. The One Voice slogan is "Just say it to play it," the purpose of the product is ease of use and the underlying technology is voice recognition.

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AJAX Toolkit Framework

What is AJAX Toolkit Framework?

AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides extensible tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) run-time environments (such as Dojo, Zimbra, etc.). This technology also contains features for developing, debugging, and testing AJAX applications. The framework provides enhanced JavaScript editing features such as edit-time syntax checking; an embedded Mozilla Web browser; an embedded DOM browser; and an embedded JavaScript debugger

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Microsoft's XPS: Impact and Opportunity

This whitepaper from a RIP vendor summarizes the technology behind Vista's XPS document format [.pdf] and its implementation as a print engine as compared to the current GDI in Windows XP. Will it suffer on non-Microsoft platforms, even if its specifications will be open, and how does it compare in methods and goals to Apple's PDF-based Quartz rendering engine?

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Microsoft boxes up Vista

Although it is still working to finish the code for Windows Vista, Microsoft has reached a decision on which versions of the operating system to offer.

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Linux as the Future Kernel of Mac OS

In the early 90's Apple was desperate for a new operating system. Past failures such as Pink and Copland left the company in need of a quick fix. With a lot of money in the bank, they started looking outside the company for a solution. The field was narrowed to NeXT and Be, companies started by ex-Apple employees. In December of 1996 a choice was made, to quote Gil Armelio, "We picked Plan A instead of Plan Be.", marking the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. Few can argue that Apple made the right decision, Apple's success under the leadership of Steve Jobs is legendary. However, the NeXTstep operating system Apple acquired from NeXT needed a lot of work before a transition could be made to satisfy Apple's goal of shipping a modern OS with their hardware. During this transition period, Apple had to decide what pieces of software would make up the new operating system. There would need to be a kernel, a compatibility layer to run old Mac OS software, and a new application framework to replace the Mac Toolbox.

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