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Operating Systems

New SkyOS 5.0 Screenshots Released 48

Posted by timothy from the eye-food dept.
Hexydes writes "After 3 months of waiting, the first round of screenshots showing off the new GUI for SkyOS 5.0 have been released. The three screenshots show various features of the new GUI, including the new WindUI theme, new Viewer window, and various window effects such as curves, shadows, and transparency. In addition to the new GUI, SkyOS 5.0 will have other additions, such as more support for hardware (just to name one, an ATI driver to go alongside the NVidia driver), speed and stability improvements, anti-aliased text, and Bochs support."
OS X

Deleting SMTP Servers from Mail.app in Mac OS X? 69

Posted by Cliff from the proper-pruining-of-your-server-lists dept.
jesse12345 asks: "Here's probably an easy one for you Unix masters. I travel a fair amount and use Mail in OS X. I'm always using lots of outgoing mail servers. What I can't figure out is how to delete outdated ones. There seems to be no GUI for this within the Mail.app. Is there some way to do this in UNIX?"
Graphics

Blender Conference Closes, Version 2.3 Released 166

Posted by timothy from the racking-up-changes dept.
Qbertino writes "The 3-day Blender Conference 2003 has closed as of last Sunday. It was a successful one, with the front line of open source 3D people attending, such as Eskil Steenberg introducing his Verse Virtual Collaboration Server and giving talks and insights into the low-level details of Verse and programs accompanying it, such as his high-end full-range color-correction tool Nil, Loq Airou, the 3D Sketchpad and Connector, a Server monitor/server-app-debugger for Verse. All with over the top OpenGL-accelerated user interfaces. An impressive set of avant garde software engineering indeed. GPLd, of course. Almost one and a half hours of exceptional blender artwork and animations were presented, along with the nominated Suzanne Awards 2003 entries. Results can be seen here." Read on for some more details from the conference.
Java

Jess in Action 120

Posted by timothy from the two-for-one dept.
Simon P. Chappell and Eric Kaun contributed reviews of Jess in Action, Ernest Friedman-Hill's introduction to Jess, a pure Java rule-based system developed at Sandia National Laboratories. Kaun writes "Jess in Action presents the Jess rule-based framework, and explores it through four meaty and well-chosen examples: a console tax forms advisor, a console PC repair assistant, a Swing HVAC controller, and a servlet-based purchasing agent. The examples vary greatly in their designs and styles of interaction between Jess and Java, and expose patterns in a concrete context. It's especially nice the way each example builds on the functionality of the one before, such as a text-based question/interview module that is extended into a Swing GUI." Chappell points out that the book's author is also Jess' creator, so he speaks from authority. Read on for both reviews.
Linux Business

Compiere on Postgres/MySQL 255

Posted by Hemos from the the-raising-of-awareness dept.
Tim Griffin writes " Compiere (arguably the most comprehensive open source ERP/CRM solution) has recently taken an interesting approach to harnessing community support for adding database independence to their product (currently it requires Oracle). They are taking pledged donations to help get the ball rolling on the project Certainly there are many feature requests in OSS I'd gladly pledge towards. Is this feature pledging a sustainability model for opensource developers/companies? Other examples, such as Blender3d which raised 100,000 EUR in 7 weeks, point in that direction. Perhaps in the future we may even see these pledge requests linked within the GUI itself? "
The Almighty Buck

Integrating A GUI Into An Existing Medical Device 129

Posted by Hemos from the build-it-from-the-bottom-up dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "As I'm not quite familiar with medical devices, I was fascinated by this long article from Medical Electronics Manufacturing. It tells us that "new technology makes graphical user interfaces (GUIs) a fast and cost-effective way to add features and improve on existing designs" of these medical devices. And it really looks simple to use. You just need a standard PC and an HTML authoring tool to develop your GUI. It is then compiled in micro-HTML and embedded in silicon, leading to a graphical OS chip which doesn't need to be powerful or have tons of memory. "The GUI shipped with the Amulet Technologies starter kit, for example, contains almost half a megabit of information in HTML. When all of the gifs, widgets, and other files are imported and compiled into micro-HTML, the file size is reduced to a mere 66 Kb of memory." This overview contains more details and a photograph of such a GUI at work."

The Art of Unix Programming 358

Posted by timothy from the at-long-last-and-for-heather dept.
rjnagle writes "Eric S. Raymond (or ESR) is widely known for the groundbreaking series of essays in his book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In TCatB, he makes a credible case for why open source sofware works so well, and why community-supported software won't put developers out of a job. (I once attended a delightful talk he gave where, among other things, he gave sartorial advice to open source developers, urging them to avoid formal suits at presentations to CEO's as a way to give off the auras of foreign dignitaries unused to local customs). The arguments presented in Cathedral and the Bazaar were persuasive and original and now regarded as obvious. In his new book, Art of Unix Programming (available for free on the web), ESR stakes an even bolder claim: that initial design decisions make Unix uniquely well-suited to take advantage of open source's power. This book is an attempt to explain why Unix is so...well, Unixy." Read on for the rest of Nagle's review of The Art of Unix Programming.
PHP

Meet The New PHP5 Toolkit, Pidget 66

Posted by timothy from the wait'll-you-meet-my-pidget dept.
Squirrel482 writes "People who like toolkits like QT and GTK but are generally ticked of by the state of GUI design on the web should check out Pidget. It is a just released GUI toolkit (along the lines of QT for the web) for PHP5. It features good object oriented design and is probably one of if not the first publicly available project to take advantage of PHP5. It's in early development and is still a little rough around the edges, but definately worth checking out."
Printer

Networked Printing on a DI-707P Router? 45

Posted by Cliff from the fixing-the-problem dept.
Feztaa asks: "I've recently purchased a D-Link DI-707P wired router, which comes equipped with a parallel port, so that you can share your printer with all computers on the local network without having to rely on somebody's computer to be on for the printer to work. Unfortunately, the router only ships with print drivers for windows. The D-Link support website basically says 'for Linux printing support, go ask the Open Source community'. I've been googling for the past few days, but most searches that include 'DI-707P' just return sites trying to sell me one. Here's what I know so far: The router's web-based config system provides no configuration for the printer, it just tells me if there's a printer plugged in and turned on or not. I portscanned the router and found that port 515 is open. I know that's LPD, but I don't know how to configure that on my system. I'm using Red Hat 9, and the GUI tools will allow me to configure a networked printer using LPD, but I can't get the thing to actually print (it asks for the IP of the printer and the name queue; I don't know how to find out the name of the queue). The printer I'm using is a BJC-250. I've had absolutely no trouble printing on this printer when it was plugged into my parallel port, so I know the printer works fine. Does anybody have any experience with this router (or similar D-Link routers), and if so, what did you have to do to get your Linux system printing with it?"
Books

Managing Linux Systems With Webmin 222

Posted by timothy from the good-with-the-bad dept.
honestpuck writes "Webmin is a pretty neat tool for administering a server using a GUI, particularly remotely. Managing Linux Systems with Webmin, written by Webmin's author, Jamie Cameron, is an extensive look at using and extending it, a good guide not without flaws." Read on for honestpuck's take on this book's good / bad ratio.

Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat 634

Posted by timothy from the impassioned-defense dept.
Charlie Dickinson writes "Writers get attached to the implement that puts words from head and heart on paper. Hemingway favored carpenter pencils for his drafts. Possibly only a blunt pencil lead would bear the vitality of words flowing from his fingertips. More recently, amid PCs on Everyperson's desktop, Northwest novelist David James Duncan noted his lengthy The Brother's K was lovingly crafted on a typewriter. Often individualistic, writers must feel free to accept or refuse new writing technology and answer only to their muse." Dickinson walks through some of the choices writers face (or have faced) in their choice of tools, and champions his own favorite -- which isn't a fancy "word processor" at all. Read on below.
GNU is Not Unix

PIXIL Embedded GUI Stack Released Under GPL 5

Posted by timothy from the windows-on-the-microworld dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Century Software has announced the release of source code for its PIXIL product line under the GNU Public License (GPL). PIXIL combines a graphical windowing environment, widget set, operating environment, and numerous applications into a tightly integrated collection built on the open standards of embedded Linux, according to Century. PIXIL is meant for use in PDAs, WebPads, set-top boxes, cellular phones, smart handhelds and thin clients. It is based on Microwindows, a screentop window manager, FLNX-based widget set, and a set of applications including PIM Suite, ViewML browser, MP3 player, MPEG viewer, Macromedia flash player, Doom, games, system and network configuration applications and more. PIXIL now has a website at www.pixil.org."
Red Hat Software

Two Books On Red Hat 9 115

Posted by timothy from the try-your-nice-new-hat dept.
Read on below for two readers' review of books aimed at Red Hat 9 users: acemics writes with a quick review of Red Hat Linux 9 Professional Secrets, and reader skogs contributes a longer look at Sam's Publishing's Red Hat Linux 9: Unleashed.
Programming

What Else Is There Besides OpenLDAP? 28

Posted by Cliff from the attempting-to-simplify-it-all dept.
The Stunted Leech asks: "I am trying to develop an LDAP interface to an existing customer database and would like to implement a simple LDAP listener that could be queried from e-mail clients. Before everyone suggests importing the data to OpenLDAP or developing a back-end for it, let me just say that it isn't very feasible: I'm the only person assigned to the project, and my company doesn't have the time or hardware resources to maintain an LDAP server. So I'm looking for very simple implementations of LDAP servers, preferably in a scripting language like Perl or Python (we use Perl for CGIs and wxPython for GUI front-ends). I've come across a couple of Java-based ones, but they seemed overly complex - all I need to do is retrieve a contact's e-mail or phone number from our database. Pointers to any sort of simple LDAP servers are welcome, even if they do little more than return the same result to all queries."
Java

Java Web Services in a Nutshell 91

Posted by timothy from the atcher-service dept.
milaf writes "Surprisingly many people have absolutely wrong ideas about Web Services. I think that the hype and perceived simplicity of everything having to do with the Web are to blame. Well, that, and the wide-spread 'confidence through ignorance' among us." Read on for milaf's review of the O'Reilly-published Java Web Services in a Nutshell, which he says displaces hype with good information.
GUI

SkyOS GUI Contest 42

Posted by timothy from the make-it-pretty dept.
SillyClown writes "Just saw this on OSNews.com. SkyOS (an alternative OS) is having a contest to replace their user interface. There are 30 or so designs, and the polls are open for voting. Check it out, help shape the future of SkyOS!"
Microsoft

What Do Programmers Like About .NET? 161

Posted by timothy from the swooning-over-it dept.
prostoalex writes "Software Development Times did a special report asking the .NET developers what they liked about the platform, since it's been 18 months since the .NET introduction by Microsoft. While the positive responses generally acclaimed Microsoft on integrating C++/C# logic development and VB GUI generation into one environment, some complaints are out there as well. From the article: "When Mark Lindley, manager of development services at Cimco, was working with .NET version 1.0 in September 2002, he needed to implement SSL transactions over TCP/IP. 'It took a long time to figure out that this functionality hadn't been implemented in .NET yet,' recalled Lindley." The article also mentions Honeywell Automated Control Systems, a .NET/J2EE software operation, considering moving their operations to .NET platform."
GUI

Linux vs. Windows: Choice vs. Usability 1083

Posted by michael from the i-thought-premium-price-meant-premium-service dept.
ThaReetLad writes "In this article at DevX, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones makes the case for a standardised GUI for Linux. He argues that the promotion of choice of GUI as a positive feature of using Linux is detrimental to its chances of attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly. From the article: '...the open source community must recognize that its primary goals: freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user.' In particular he argues that the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."

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