Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Sun Joins the Open Source VM Game
Sun announced today that it is open sourcing its bare-metal hyper visor VM technology xVM. This comes on the heels of the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V for free, reported last week on What a N00b. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Sep 15th, 2008
Firefox 3.0's Killer Feature
It seems like every time I try out a new version of a piece of software that I use, there’s a feature that really makes me mad and then later I realize I can’t live without it. Firefox 3.0 was no exception. When I first started using the beta, the first thing that I noticed that was different was that it searched both the URL and the page titles of your history when typing into the address bar. I use the history in my browser to a great extent and it seemed to get in my way when I was trying to get at what I needed to and I struggled to find it.
I was really frustrated when the software didn’t react as it used to. For example, I use Webmin to a great extent both personally and at work. Whenever I wanted to webmin.com, I’d start typing ‘webmin’ in the address bar and once my history started popping up, I’d hit the down arrow, hit enter and I was there. Now, when I do the same thing I get taken to my Webmin login pages since “Webmin” is in the title of the page and I tend to go there first. That change frustrated me to no end until one day I wanted to get logged into one of my systems. Absent-mindedly, I started typing in “webmin” into the address bar, hit the down arrow and hit enter. Without even realizing it, I was brought to the place I wanted to go without typing in the address. Now, it comes second nature. In my work I use the Zimbra wiki a lot and tend to go to a lot of the same pages for reference, and I can just type in “wiki Zimbra” and then the topic I want to find the pages very easily. Even though Firefox 3 is still fairly new, I don’t know what I’d do without that feature anymore. Mozilla did a great job of giving the me what I really needed, not what I thought I needed.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 24th, 2008
Turbo Mode Is Back!
For all of you geeks out there who miss being able to hit the turbo button on your 386, fret no more! While there’s no actual turbo button, (which is saddening, I know) Intel has announced at the Intel Developer Forum that the new “Nehalem” processors will come equipped with a turbo mode. The Nehalem chips which are slated to ship in Q4 of 2008 come with four cores, but use Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology to make the system perform as if there were eight. The new turbo mode will allow the processor to turn off power to certain cores when they are not needed, thus reducing power consumption. Power usage becomes extremely important in laptops where battery life can be greatly increased and in data centers where a company may have hundreds or thousands of systems running 24×7.
Intel also showed off the first quad-core processor built for mobile computers, the mobile Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.
For the record, the older “Turbo mode” was slightly different. It was for slowing down the speeds of the machine to be compatible with some older software.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 20th, 2008
Zimbra Releases Package for Ubuntu 8.04
Everyone’s favorite collaboration suite, Zimbra, released its newest version 5.0.9 late yesterday with something lots of open source enthusiasts have been begging for in the forums for some time: support for Ubuntu 8.04! In the past, Hardy Heron users had to wait for an alternate build to be released on sourceforge or build the install from scratch, or resort to running the older LTS Ubuntu release. Now, with the newest release, packages for both 32 and 64 bit Ubuntu 8.04 are available from Zimbra. The release also includes support for viewing multiple calendars on the iPhone.
The supported “Network Edition” is still in beta with limited support, but the community packages can be downloaded here.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 19th, 2008
End of Linspire, Freespire Moving to Debian Base
Xandros announced late last week the end of the Linspire distribution. This announcement comes just months after the aquisition of Linspire by Xandros. Linspire originally went by the name of Lindows and has bragged itself up for being the first Linux to be sold at a large US retailer, namely Wal-Mart. Xandros already maintains two other pay-for Linux distributions: Xandros Desktop Professional and Freespire. Xandros has also announced that Freespire will be shifting back to a Debian base rather than the Ubuntu base of late. Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos says the moves are to reduce the amount of code bases the company needs to support and to bring an emphasis to stability and consistency from the Debian core. Typaldos says also to expect the CNR package management software seen in Linspire to appear in the Xandros and Freespire distributions.
According to the website, you can currently purchase computers with Linspire pre-installed from a large amount of major retailers including Wal-Mart, Buy.com, and Amazon. Although the timing is interesting since the acquisition happened such a short time ago, the changes should allow Xandros to focus more on doing one (or two) thing[s] well rather than having to maintain three different distributions. Xandros seems to be learning a lesson from Novell and Red Hat, using Freespire as its community-based testing and proving grounds for its pay-for, supported Linux distribution.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 12th, 2008
