Apple computer has a long and distinguished list of “firsts” in
personal computing, not to mention the least of which, they invented
personal computing as we know it today. The others include a long line
of stuff, including, but not limited to, in personal computer “firsts,”
first with a GUI, first with a mouse, first with a color monitor, first
with a floppy drive, first with a hard drive, first to have a CD-ROM,
first to make home movie editing possible, first with USB and Firewire,
first with 64-bit processor — the list goes on.
The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For
the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much
that those running distributions now going on a year in age are
really missing anything terribly substantial. We did find a few
interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with
Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1.
The wake of the controversial XFree86 license modifications that will premier in XFree86 4.4 is growing larger each day. It now appears that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mandrake Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, OpenBSD and Gentoo Linux will be sticking with XFree86 4.3 in their next respective releases. With such a large controversy surrounding the license, we decided to ask Free Software Foundation founder and president Richard M. Stallman about the issue.
Trolltech's Qt development toolkit is serious stuff. As the foundation of KDE on the GNU/Linux desktop as well as its usage as a popular environment (when matched with Trolltech's Qtopia) for PDA interfaces, not to mention great support for Mac OS X, it is hard to imagine any tool that offers a comparably serious cross platform solution. With the third major release of the Qt 3 series last Wednesday, Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord graciously took some time to talk with us about Qt and related topics.
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Apple Macintosh computer. While the original Mac is certainly meager by today's standards, there are few that would argue against its revolutionary status in the early years of personal computing. In commemoration of that event, today also marks the launch of OfB MacFor.Biz, the new section of Open for Business that will cover the Mac in much the same way OfB covers GNU/Linux and BSD. In this premier piece, we will examine the latest Mac OS X, 10.3 “Panther,” on two separate generations of Macintosh systems.
Update: Improved OpenGL benchmark results included below.
MandrakeSoft, the French GNU/Linux distributor who filed for bankruptcy protection one year ago last week, announced today that its first fiscal quarter of 2004 resulted in a positive operating result of €280,000. This follows news in recent weeks that the company is preparing an exit plan to leave bankruptcy protection by the end of the quarter.
As promised in part 1 of this review, this time around we will consider the software side of the Shuttle XPC SB62G2, a system we named our product of the year for 2003. The Shuttle is an excellent little machine, as we noted last time, but there is still that one important detail that needs to be considered: how well does it work with GNU/Linux? That is what I will attempt to overview below.
This year was a year that wasn't exactly how we might have hoped, but overall, the state of GNU/Linux was overall better at this side of 2003 than it was at the other. In our annual tradition, what follows is a look at the ups - and downs - of GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software in 2003.
When deploying GNU/Linux systems, there is always the predicament of what kind of system to use. You could continue buying systems from OEMs such as Dell and Gateway that do not support GNU/Linux and simply replace the systems' included OS with a GNU/Linux disk image. You could also go with HP Compaq's d220/d330 series of computers that offer Mandrake Linux 9.1 preloaded. However, if you are looking for systems that offer something more than a basic tower that includes GNU/Linux, you need to look elsewhere - at Shuttle.
In its yearly financial report for shareholders, issued today, MandrakeSoft SA (OTC: MDKFF) highlighted positive financial improvements. According to the publicly available document, revenue was down but losses also decreased as compared to 2001 and 2002.