OSNews says Meet Fedora Core 4. “The latest issue of Red Hat Magazine includes an interesting overview of the new Fedora Core 4 among other things, released earlier this week.”
I can’t believe I missed the announcement. Must have had a case of the Mondays. Hop over to the Fedora site and join the BitTorrent – share the bandwidth and speed everyone’s download. DVD and CD isos of source and binary are available for i386, x64 and PPC.
The Monadnock Linux User Group meets the second Thursday of most months at the SAU 1 office in Peterborough. This month, there will be a demonstration of “The Kuro Box” a PowerPC-based box costing $160 that needs a hard drive to run. Tom’s Hardware reviews it here, another from Penguin PPC. and IBM DeveloperWorks. Looking forward to seeing the presentation.
OSNews posts Confirmed: Apple to use Intel Chips. “Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life. There have been rumors to this effect… We’ve had teams working on the ‘just in case’ scenario.” said Steve Jobs. Apple will ship a Mac with Intel processors by June 6th, 2006, as reports said. It should be complete by June 2007. Says that Intel offers a better roadmap for the markets that Apple services. Jobs talked about IBM missing the 3 GHz mark for the G5, and in not being able to put one in a PowerBook. Today’s WWDC keynote demonstration has been done entirely on an Intel Mac. Developers applauded Steve when he said that both processors would be supported for a long time and the core to this will be universal binaries (as I predicted yesterday).”
I’m following along on Brian Jepson’s blog. If the keynote was simulcast, I couldn’t find the link. Bummer. Perhaps Apple will post the keynote later.
I find the idea of OS X on Intel intriguing. I wonder if it will run on anything other than Apple-branded hardware.
MacMerc is also posting the keynote, although their server seems to be melting…
Apple stock is rising (disclosure: I am a minority stockholder, a tiny minority), but how long will it be before investors realize that PowerPC sales are likely to tank with new Intel models a year away? The Rosetta technology Apple is using promises full binary compatibility between the two machines, but buyers tend to be shy…
OSNews is reporting that Red Hat lets go of Fedora Linux. “Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation.”
Unlike the news out of Seattle, which has been a pretty grim bunch of product delays, end-of-life announcements and news on which products they will no longer be supporting, the Linux community is hopping with activity. Look to Fedora Core 4 to ship on Monday. And keep an eye on Ubuntu as it rapidly becomes the desktop of choice.
From the macosxhints Pick Of The Week department: Taboo – Prevent tab closing stupidity in Safari. “The macosxhints Rating:[Score: 10 out of 10], Developer: Obsessive Compulsive Development, Price: Free
“A simple PotW this week, as it really only does one thing. Taboo is a plug-in for Safari that warns you if you hit the red…” more.
I cannot tell you how many times I have screamed “No!” as I mean to close a tab or another document and inadvertently closed a dozen precious tabs in Safari. This is a must-have!
Shame on Apple for shipping their Spotlight desktop search engine with support for MS Office, but no support for searching OpenOffice.org documents. Oo.o documents are ZIPped-up sets of XML documents, and should be a piece of cake to fix.
The Open Source community to the rescue again, with NeoLight, an early beta product now, but planned to be included in future versions of Oo.o, which will add the search capabilities into Spotlight.
With the Oo.o 2.0 document format forming the basis for the OASIS document format I mentioned yesterday, let’s hope we see a pickup in the support for this format around the office automation software industry.
OSNews points to an article GPL Under “Price Fixing” Legal Attack. “The suit claims that the “Free Software Foundation has entered into contracts and otherwise conspired and agreed with individual software authors and commercial distributors of commodity software products such as Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. to artificially fix the prices charged for computer software programs through the promotion and use of an adhesion contract that was created, used and promoted since at least the year 1991 by the Free Software Foundation”
Groklaw responds with a pretty clear interpretation that this is nonsense.
Laura and I were at our local Apple dealer – Bitznbytes in Concord – at 6 PM last night to pick up a copy of Tiger. Fortunately, there was no long line of loonies dressed as strange characters – no wait at all, in fact – walked in and picked up our copy, chatted with the staff, played with the computers and left.
Today was much too nice a day to spend inside playing on the computer – Laura and I worked in the yard instead – so I’ll devote a little time over the weekend to getting the machine backed up and set up for the upgrade. O’Reilly & Associates web site MacDevCenter like “Everything You Need to Know to Install Tiger and “Housecleaning Tips for Tiger” worth reviewing before you leap in.
As my iMac is primarily a desktop machine for NeoOffice/J documents, email, browsing, blogging and as a terminal into remote machines, I don’t have a lot of software installed on it, and so I’m going to try the lazy man’s approach of upgrade-in-place, rather than a Freemanize of “blow everything away” – partition, format and reinstall – that would be more appropriate for a more heavily used machine. If the install gets glitchy, of course. that’s always the last resort. Stay tuned.
Ars Technica has a review of Tiger here including what seems to be a well-deserved bash of the Mail GUI redesign and a great explanation of fine-grained vs. course-grained kernel locking. Ars Technica has also started a set of journal pages, including an Apple journal page appropriately named “Infinite Loop.”
Slashdot notes Rave Reviews for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. druid_getafix writes “The first mass market reviews of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger are trickling in with a big thumbs up for the release. Walt Mossberg of the WSJ says ‘Tiger Leaps Out in Front’ but complains about slowness of some applications – notably Mail. David Pogue of NYT says ‘But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.’ In related news Mossberg also covers the rising incidence of spam/virii in the Windows world and says ‘…consider dumping Windows altogether and switching to Apple’s Macintosh…’. Previous reviews of Tiger were covered on /. earlier.”
OSNews reports *Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: A Review*. “OSNews reviews Apple’s latest OS upgrade. Is it an overpriced, glorified point release or a truly worthy upgrade with major new functionality? Is it a Longhorn killer or just more of the same? We’ll take a look, and try to see what’s on the surface as well as what’s under the hood. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article…”
I’ve reserved a copy at my local Apple dealer, Available tomorrow at 6 PM.
OSNews points to Of Course Macs Are More Expensive… Aren’t They?. “So, I went out to at least partially test this theory, and to do appropriate comparisons between Dell computers and Apple computers. I’m hardly the first one to take this challenge but I’ve decided it’s time to stop talking and taking other peoples’ word for it, and go get some concrete facts to put on (digital) paper.”
This looks like a well-reasoned, well-researched study. Take a look and see if you come to similar conclusions.