News Archive - October 2006
PCLinuxOS 0.93a
Sunday 22nd October 2006
Categories: Reviews, GNU/Linux, FLOSS
PCLinuxOS is a bit of an unknown quantity to me. It appears to be pretty popular, sitting at number six on Distrowatch at the time of writing, yet I rarely hear anything about it except for the odd release. So, seeing as I know next to nothing about PCLinuxOS, it's about time that I went and saw what the fuss was about.
Fedora Core 6, Portland and Filesystems
Tuesday 17th October 2006
Category: News
First of all, Fedora Core 6 has been delayed a little again, this time pushing the release date back to Thursday 19th October.
Also in the news is the release of Portland 1.0, designed to bring GNOME, KDE and other desktops a little closer together for the programmer. LXer runs with Highly Anticipated 'Portland' Ready for Prime Time, while DesktopLinux.com goes with Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market. This really means the release of xdg-utils 1.0, a set of utilities that helps programmers to put icons on the desktop, open a file, and so forth, without having to consider what desktop environment the user might happen to be in.
Despite Han Reiser's arrest, Reiser development is set to continue while under Namesys, Reiser's company. An future alternative, ext4, has gotten closer to release in the main Linux kernel by appearing in Andrew Morton's own brew.
The fabled new core of GIMP is actually progressing once again, with the Generic Graphical Library having been demonstrated at the Piksel 06 festival. It's good to see some movement in this area, since a new core such as this might allow the GIMP to better square up to Photoshop and the rest of the competition.
Oh yes, and there's something about browser wars between Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, as well as somebody that isn't bored of 3D desktops.
Mandriva, SUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora
Tuesday 10th October 2006
Category: News
Yes, there's something about almost everyone this time around. Firstly, Mandriva Linux 2007 has been released, although the biggest, and presumably best, version will cost you. Another Red Hat derivative was supposed to be released tomorrow, but Fedora Core 6's release has been delayed. Don't worry, it will still be here quite soon, and hopefully a little more bug free as a result.
Going over to SUSE, there's the new that SUSE 10.2 will not be using ReiserFS as the default filesystem, swapping to the old favourite ext3 instead. Looking at Ubuntu, we have the article discussing how Canonical intends to make money with Ubuntu.
There are also plenty of Microsoft stories (as always), such as:
- Microsoft keelhauls customers in WGA snafu
- Firefox Gains Ground On Microsoft's IE
- Microsoft enters the anti-virus bear-pit (again)
Finally, there's something that's perhaps a little more fun: N.E.R.O., a game that let's you train your own soldiers, in the sense of telling the AI what is good and what is bad. A bit like training a dog really.