Sun Microsystems Open Sourcing Java Technology!

Sun open sourcing Java is certainly is one of most important landmark IT events of this year. Congratulations to everyone at Sun Microsystems and also to the Open source community. Sun has proven its IT leadership once again. Perhaps we we’ll also see one day Free Unix distribution based on Solaris kernel, GNU tools and Java! That would be awesome. Java platform based software stack is a fundamental part of modern software, free and otherwise. Sun, we support you!

.. and RMS phrasing Sun ???, this is like a story from a parallel universe. Read all about it!

http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/

Google Closes YouTube Acquisition

Holy Photons!

Based on today’s closing price of $481.03 per share, the deal is already worth $1.775 billion to YouTube’s shareholders.

BTW, you have heard it first here a little more then a year ago:

http://myitbookmarks.blogspot.com/2005/08/projects-and-sites-that-create-large.html

Fedora Core 6 is out, first impressions

I had a chance to take Fedora Core 6 last week for a test drive. I have to admit this was the best experience I had with 3 D desktop operating system. Now I have migrated all my machines but a laptop to FC6. I was pretty happy with Suse 10.1, but I’m the RedHat and Fedora user for many years and just habitually more familiar with it. I'll totally expect you liking Suse 10.1 a lot more if you were using Suse before.

To date, I had a chance of trying 3D desktops on Vista Beta 2 and also XGL/compiz on Suse 10.1 and Fedora Core 6. This is the short recap:

• Vista – it’s a joke, plain and simple. 3D effects I have seen were very primitive; the entire installation was running very slow on a fairly up to date laptop with decent configuration - 2 GHz, 1gB RAM HP laptop.
• Suse 10.1 – I was a spell bound by XGL/compiz! The installation was very fast and straight forward. However to enable GXL I had to install ATI proprietary driver and it took me considerable amount of time to figure it out. It turned out that update utility that kicked in right after the Suse 10.1 installation, had updated the kernel but not its sources which are needed to compile the ATI driver. Driver installation script was complaining about the mismatch. It took me a while to figure out my way around "yast2" to get all the proper updates in. At the end it was really worth the time. I loved it. My system had appeared to be little sluggish after running for a while, but it could have been something I was doing. I was very happy overall.
• Fedora Core 6 – installation on my desktop with 82865G Intel video hardware was flawless. First I did an upgrade over FC 5 on my desktop at work. Once the upgrade was done, all I had to do is to install compiz and enable 3D desktop. I was done in 2 minutes! I was very surprised; it doesn’t get any better then this. I was expecting much fiddling around with proprietary drivers. The same day I decided to migrate to FC6 at home as well. Installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver was a challenge. For one, XGL is only works with beta driver and I had to fiddle little bit with it to get it to compile. Once compiled, the module was giving me an error while loading, apparently due to the kernel package architecture mismatch: i586 kernel + kernel-devel i686. After a bit a browsing and reading I’ve got everything working.

Conclusion: XGL and compiz are awesome! I will stick with Fedora Core 6. It works great, however it will likely to take another release on both distros to polish 3D desktop installation to the point when any Linux will be able to take advantage of it. Thanks to all people who contributed!

P.S.

1. Older vmplayer wont work, yout need to get an update.
2. XGL compatible NVIDIA Linux driver was released on November 8th
3. You can get ISO image torrents here: