A few weeks back, at the end of December, FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 was released. FreeBSD 7 will no doubt prove to be quite revolutionary. For one thing, this will be the first major FreeBSD release in a number of years. FreeBSD 6.0 was released in November of 2005, so there has been quite some time for the development of FreeBSD 7 to take place.
KDE 4.0 was released several days back, and thanks to the KDE Four Live CD, I was able to give it a try with very little effort. Having used it for about a day and a half now, I’d like to share some of my impressions of this new release of KDE. Specifically, I will be focusing on the Konqueror 4.0 Web browser. But please keep in mind that I have not performed any formal studies or benchmarking, and what follows is merely my opinion.
Parrot 0.5.0 was released just over a week ago. As this article discusses, one of the major changes was the transition to NQP.
While NQP brings some very interesting technical benefits, it also further shows one of the significant problems with Parrot that I identified a couple of months back. Namely, the near complete lack of design and architecture stability as the project matures.
Today I was reading an article concerning the design of new back and forward buttons for Firefox. While such thought and experimentation has its place, I’m not so sure it’s appropriate considering the current state of the Firefox codebase.
Recently, I read about how, as of the middle of November 2007, there were about 700 blocker bugs against Firefox 3.0. It is anticipated that about 80% of those bugs will not be fixed before Firefox 3.0 is released. And this is for a release that is already a number of months behind schedule.
Kubuntu 7.10 RC was announced as available several days ago. I installed it immediately, and I have to say, I’m very impressed! Although it’s still just a release candidate, it has all of the necessary ingredients: stability, responsiveness, innovation and coherency.
While other articles will no doubt focus on the many benefits that Kubuntu 7.10 will bring, I’d like to look forward into the future. Namely, this is because of the upcoming release of KDE 4, which is currently planned for December 11, 2007.
About a month ago, I considered the factors that were holding back one open source project with much potential, Parrot. Today I will do the same for another open source project: .
As the GNUstep homepage states, “GNUstep is a cross-platform, object-oriented framework for desktop application development. Based on the OpenStep specification originally created by NeXT (now Apple), GNUstep enables developers to rapidly build sophisticated software by employing a large library of reusable software components.”
Today I had an opportunity to use NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1. Just for the record, it was used on a uniprocessor Core 2 Duo system, with 2 GB of RAM. The operating system was Ubuntu Linux, with the nVidia OpenGL drivers installed, on Sun’s 1.6 JVM. The Java 2D OpenGL pipeline was enabled, as well.
There was some discussion at Slashdot recently about bloat-free software. Many people were giving examples such as Firefox, Opera, and GIMP. But when it comes to truly bloat-free software, I think NetBSD is a perfect example.
Necessity is part of the reason why NetBSD is bloat-free. A bloated operating system just cannot run on the wide array of vintage hardware that NetBSD supports. So bloat-avoidance is an integral part of their development philosophy.
Earlier today I was reading an article about Parrot. Parrot is, as stated on the project’s Web site, “a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator.”
I read today about the finstall effort for FreeBSD. It is a GUI installer for FreeBSD. Although it sounds like a helpful tool for some users, I don’t think I’d want it to replace the existing sysinstall installation system.
One of the main benefits of sysinstall is that it’s not a GUI installer. This means that it has relatively minimal requirements when it comes to video hardware. Furthermore, it is very usable when using only the keyboard. Thus, it isn’t necessary to even have a mouse available. So it remains a very viable option, especially in hardware-limited situations.