Slashdot Mirror

Eugenia Loli-Queru writes: "OSNews is hosting an interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the creator of the Menuet Operating System. Menuet is a new, 32-bit OS under the GPL and it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16.7 million colors (except with 3Dfx Voodoo cards), sound at 44.1 khz stereo etc. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code!"

Eugenia Loli-Queru writes: "OSNews is hosting an interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the creator of the Menuet Operating System. Menuet is a new, 32-bit OS under the GPL and it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16.7 million colors (except with 3Dfx Voodoo cards), sound at 44.1 khz stereo etc. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code!"

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an exclusive interview with the Konqueror team, KDE's integrated filemanager, image/document viewer and web browser. Dirk Mueller, Waldo Bastian, Carsten Pfeiffer and Simon Hausmann are answering questions regarding the future of Konqueror, its portability and the integration with KDE3 and QT3. And speaking about KDE3, OSNews is reporting what's new in the new version: KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV) as part of the default installation, support for extremely large files, new versions for KNode and KMail, email templates in KMail, advanced Web Shortcuts, S/MIME support, plugins for the KMenu, a graphical Regular Expression app (KRegExpEditor) and much more. A (very early) alpha version is already available."

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an exclusive interview with the Konqueror team, KDE's integrated filemanager, image/document viewer and web browser. Dirk Mueller, Waldo Bastian, Carsten Pfeiffer and Simon Hausmann are answering questions regarding the future of Konqueror, its portability and the integration with KDE3 and QT3. And speaking about KDE3, OSNews is reporting what's new in the new version: KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV) as part of the default installation, support for extremely large files, new versions for KNode and KMail, email templates in KMail, advanced Web Shortcuts, S/MIME support, plugins for the KMenu, a graphical Regular Expression app (KRegExpEditor) and much more. A (very early) alpha version is already available."

JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an exclusive interview with the Konqueror team, KDE's integrated filemanager, image/document viewer and web browser. Dirk Mueller, Waldo Bastian, Carsten Pfeiffer and Simon Hausmann are answering questions regarding the future of Konqueror, its portability and the integration with KDE3 and QT3. And speaking about KDE3, OSNews is reporting what's new in the new version: KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV) as part of the default installation, support for extremely large files, new versions for KNode and KMail, email templates in KMail, advanced Web Shortcuts, S/MIME support, plugins for the KMenu, a graphical Regular Expression app (KRegExpEditor) and much more. A (very early) alpha version is already available."

Little Sheep writes: "An interesting round-up interview regarding modern Linux filesystems is published by OSNews, featuring the developers behind IBM's JFS, ReiserFS and SGI's XFS filesystems."

JigSaw writes: "The team consisting of TheRasterman and Mandrake (among others) are hard at work to bring Enlightenment 0.17 to the Linux desktop. E17 will be a lot more than a window manager, something closer to a complete GUI solution for X. OSNews hosts an interesting interview with Rasterman and also features some (unseen-before) screenshots of E17. Some say that E17 will be the next big thing in the GUI design (even if Rasterman states in the interview that Linux won't probably take over the Desktop), with plans to incorporate libraries like eVas, which look very modern in concept, design and implementation."

JigSaw writes: "The team consisting of TheRasterman and Mandrake (among others) are hard at work to bring Enlightenment 0.17 to the Linux desktop. E17 will be a lot more than a window manager, something closer to a complete GUI solution for X. OSNews hosts an interesting interview with Rasterman and also features some (unseen-before) screenshots of E17. Some say that E17 will be the next big thing in the GUI design (even if Rasterman states in the interview that Linux won't probably take over the Desktop), with plans to incorporate libraries like eVas, which look very modern in concept, design and implementation."

JigSaw writes "The OpenGL Architecture Review Board announced the new OpenGL 1.3 specification (1.8 MB pdf). In OpenGL 1.3, several additional features and functions have been ratified and brought into the API's core functionality. New features include Cube map texturing, multisampling, new texture modes that provide more powerful ways of applying textures to rendered objects, compressed texture framework etc. Let's all hope that GL can catch up with Direct3D now, as with the latest DirectX8, Direct3D has done some big steps towards feature-set, speed and even non-bloatiness when it comes to coding for it, while OpenGL 1.2 was released more than 2 years ago and it did not offer as much."

OS News is reporting that Be Inc. is targeting music/audio professionals. This makes good sense since musicians are not averse to other platforms: in the 1980s they swarmed towards the Atari ST (in-build midi ports) which had a disproportionate number of professional music programs from Steinberg and co. Interestingly 4Front the makers of the OSS sound drivers in the kernel and the OSS API will be supporting BeOS.

Here's are rather nice story of a Commodore 64 Christmas... Do you still remember when getting a new computer was a whole different world of experience? Certainly I remember that when I moved from the ZX81 to the BBC B to the Atari ST. But strangely, not since then in the PC/Linux world: the leaps feel smaller. Anyway, here are some people who need that old 386 motherboard lying in your cupboard: they'll be donating them to disadvantaged people and schools to run Linux on. Link from OS News.

Clark Shishido writes " MacWeek has rumors on Gateway's plans for AmigaOS 4.0. sounds like the good old days when Amigas could run Mac software faster than a Mac. Also note the irony that it might boot BeOS which is Gasse's Mac-Amiga succesor. Maybe this will knock some sense into Apple that it has to innovate and compete instead of killing clones. I'm not an Amiga head, and I'll probably be editting makefiles for compiling under MacOS X, but I think that it's good that Apple can't be complacent. " Update (S) Apparently this information may not have been completely true, but a practical joke. Oh well.

Kodi writes "I found a link on OS News to a page that lets you have a faux MacOS right in your browser, complete with working menus, draggable windows, and draggable icons. Coolest thing I've seen done using only JavaScript. Also make sure you check the trash. (Note: If your browser doesn't get past the loading screen on the above link, try here to skip it.) " Not as cool as the Window Maker simulator, but I think I'll load it up and leave it up instead of a screensaver and see what my roommates think.

Our colleagues at OS News have a feature written by a Windows programmer learning Linux. It's interesting to see what he has to say, since part of the "Linux conversion" involves converting the good Windows programmers to Linux. But that does not mean I agree with him, I happen to like VI more than "IDEs", I prefer ls to Windows Explorer, and TeX beats the living daylights out of Word...

Our colleagues at OS News have a feature written by a Windows programmer learning Linux. It's interesting to see what he has to say, since part of the "Linux conversion" involves converting the good Windows programmers to Linux. But that does not mean I agree with him, I happen to like VI more than "IDEs", I prefer ls to Windows Explorer, and TeX beats the living daylights out of Word...

From Os News, HP is reconsidering its decision to gather a set of partners and set up its own standards process. Instead it will work with Sun to make a common Embedded Java standard. Then again, as a reader pointed out maybe not.

A story on OS News pointed to this story that talks about SGI's planned line of NT based PC workstations. Personally, this breaks my heart. I had always though of SGI as a Unix champion (jokes about Irix aside) and it hurts to see them pushing NT. Is this the begining of the end for SGI or a great new strategy?

James Baughn sent us this link and this one to information about a project underway to convert win32 apps to native OS2 apps. No emulation, just flat out conversion.

OS News reports that Taiwanese Mac clone maker Umax has licensed the BeOS for use on their machines. Umax states the reason as a large, active, developer community.

I wonder if Umax will renew their MacOS license...*that* seems premature...