How the clammy claws of Novell NetWare were torn from today's networks
Before the internet, local area networks were the big thing. A company called Novell was the first to exploit the trend for connecting systems, ultimately becoming "the LAN king" with its NetWare server operating system.
There were alternatives to Novell and NetWare in the 1990s - 3Com’s 3+Share, for example – but such was its …
Windows NT grandaddy OpenVMS taken out back, single gunshot heard
Digital Compaq HP has announced the end of support for various flavours of OpenVMS, the ancient but trustworthy server operating system whose creator went on to build Windows NT.
OpenVMS started out as VAX/VMS on Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minicomputers, then later was ported to DEC's fast Alpha RISC chips – before the …
How Microsoft shattered Gnome's unity with Windows 95
There never will be a year when Linux conquers the desktop, because desktop computers are going to merge into tablet-style touch-driven devices and disappear. But desktop Linux was getting close, until Microsoft derailed it a few years back.
The GNOME project’s recent release, GNOME 3.8, served to remind me of the significance …
Ubuntu without the 'U': Booting the Big Four remixes
It's the end of April, so that means that there's a new release of Ubuntu. Well, actually, no - it means that there are eight of them. Don't like standard Ubuntu's Mac-OS-X-like Unity desktop? Here's where to look.
There are umpteen "remixes" alongside the eponymous distro. These mostly differ by having a different desktop - and …
The GPL self-destruct mechanism that is killing Linux
Does one of the biggest-ever revolutions in software, open source, contain the seeds of its own decay and destruction?
Poul-Henning Kamp, a noted FreeBSD developer and creator of the Varnish web-server cache, wrote this year that the open-source world's bazaar development model - described in Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral …
What's new in Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 – "Cloud OS" as Microsoft sometimes refers to it, and "WS2012" as we'll call it for short – is the result of the deepest and broadest developer effort in the history of Microsoft server products: 10,000 engineers working for four years. Comments from testers and early adopters have included "jaw-dropping", " …
Windows Server 2012: Microsoft's other Big Push
In 1985, Commodore held the UK launch of the Amiga 1000 at the World of Commodore Show at the Novotel in Hammersmith. Twenty-seven years later, Microsoft used the same venue to host the Technical Launch of Windows Server 2012.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 UK technical launch day
The Amiga was Commodore's response to the …
Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN
The original Unix desktop, the Common Desktop Environment or CDE, is back. Seven years after Sun replaced it with GNOME on Solaris, the Open Group's Common Desktop Environment has returned, now fully open-source and with a modern Linux port.
CDE was developed about 20 years ago as a unified desktop environment for all the …
Raspberry Pi IN THE SKY: Wallet-sized PC is disaster drone brain
A British-led Japan-based group is building a free-software-powered flying robot for use by disaster relief organisations – and at its heart is tech darling the Raspberry Pi.
There are lots of uses for the £30 Pi, from an educational device to a media player, if you can get hold of one of the boards. OpenRelief is planning …
Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
The Best...
RH Numbers
Reg Hardware PC Week
The Raspberry Pi – if you can get your hands on one – isn't the only small, inexpensive ARM computer around these days. There are quite a few options with varying speeds and price points. So here we take up ARMs with a full review of the ARMini – uniquely British offering that is …
Faster mobile data: the road to 4G
Reg Hardware Mobile Week
The great thing about standards, as some wit once said, is that there are so many to choose from. Mobile phones are afflicted worse than most technology – a multiplicity of standards, nested within one another like a messy set of Russian dolls filled with alphabet soup.
The 'generations' of mobile …
Release the brakes on your virtual servers
One of the dirty little secrets of virtualisation is the performance cost: operating systems running inside a virtual machine are slower than those running natively on the same hardware, sometimes by quite some margin.
This is termed virtualisation overhead, and with current whole-system virtualisation, it's a given. It always …
Where are all the decent handheld scribbling tools?
As the market for computerised devices grows ever bigger and the internet takes over its users' social lives, it's a good time to be a gadget fan. They're everywhere, from smartphones and fondleslabs to pocket games consoles. There are notebooks of every size and shape from netbooks to desktop replacements. What were once mere …
Ubuntu republic riven by damaging civil wars
There's a popular misconception about open source: that it's democratic, that all users have a vote over its direction and development or even the running of the community around it.
The users of Ubuntu, arguably the world's most popular Linux distro these days, are currently discovering that this is not how it works. The result …
Cheap as chips: The future of PC virtualisation
VMware was founded in 1998, and until the launch of its eponymous product the next year, the PC’s x86 architecture had been considered to be impossible to fully virtualise.
Since that time, although VMware continues to prosper, prices of virtualisation tools have fallen to an all-time low – in fact, most hypervisors are free, …
Virtualisation soaks up corporate IT love
Virtualisation is the in-thing in corporate IT. You’d think it was some kind of shiny new concept that had never been done before, a panacea for all computing ills. Everyone seems to be doing it.
It’s not even restricted to servers any more. Suppliers and customers are both getting excited about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure …
Fun and games in userland
Operating-system level virtualisation
As we explained in part 2 of this series, A brief history of virtualisation, in the 1960s, it was a sound move to run one OS on top of a totally different one. On the hardware of the time, full multi-user time-sharing was a big challenge, which virtualisation neatly sidestepped by splitting …
Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation
Virtualisation is not a novelty. It's actually one of the last pieces of the design of 1960s computers to trickle down to the PC – and only by understanding where it came from and how it was and is used can you begin to see the shape of its future in its PC incarnation.
As described in our first article in this series, current …
Before 'the cloud' was cool: Virtualising the un-virtualisable
Buzzwords often have very short lifetimes in IT. Today it's cloud computing, but there would be no infinitely scalable cloud without the previous "big new thing": virtualisation. We take it for granted now, but it's worth remembering that it is still quite a new and relatively immature technology, with a long way to go.
In this …
'Lion' Apple Mac OS X 10.7: Sneak Preview
The first major update to Apple's Mac operating system in some five years is nearly ready, and what has been removed is as significant as its improvements. Mac OS X 10.7, known informally as Lion, continues the trend of removing "legacy" components and technologies from OS X with a zeal that would leave Microsoft quivering in …
CIX conferencing system is bought out – again
CIX, probably the oldest surviving online service in the UK, has a new owner, ICUK, which hopes to grow the system and attract new users.
CIX - or the Compulink Information Exchange - started off in the pre-web days of the mid-1980s as a shareware distribution house's Fidonet bulletin board service, but the online community …
WTF is... 4G
The great thing about standards, as some wit once said, is that there are so many to choose from. Mobile phones are afflicted worse than most technology – a multiplicity of standards, nested within one another like a messy set of Russian dolls filled with alphabet soup.
LTE Advance Logo
The 'generations' of mobile networks …
Apple Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server
With Apple’s Xserve now discontinued, the only two Mac servers available are the Mini and the Mac Pro Server. The Mac Mini is Apple’s lowest-cost computer yet in its more expensive server incarnation it dispenses with the optical drive of its desktop sibling, instead opting for a second 2.5in hard disk.
Mac Mini with Snow …
A Linux server OS that's fiddly but tweakable
ClearOS is the new name for Point Clark Network's ClarkConnect, which was a commercial server distro, released in 2000, with a limited free version. Now, though, Point Clark has restructured and the distro is managed by ClearConnect, which has made it free and open source. The result is that what was the top-of-the-range …
A young and pretty Linux server OS that takes a bit of work
Zentyal 2 is something a little bit different, although it too has changed its name recently: version 1 was called e-Box. A decade younger than its rivals, it is based on Ubuntu, but its developers skip the normal semi-annual releases, and only use the Long Term Support ones that Canonical releases every other year. E-Box …
A Linux server OS that's had 11 years to improve
SME Server is pretty much the original ready-rolled server distribution. Although it has changed hands – and names – a few times, it's been around since 1999, when it was known as e-Smith, a name you'll still see in a few places.
Name: SME Server 7.5.1
Supplier: Free download
Price: Free, no subscriptions or registration …
Linux servers for Windows folk: go on, give it a bash
Despite all the hullabaloo about Ubuntu and other desktop offerings, for most organisations, the main use of Linux is on servers.
Ignore all the waffle about flashy desktops and which browser is best, because the truth is, most organisations run on Windows and tons of Windows software – perhaps with a few Macs thrown in – and …
Windows 7 SP1 'beta' leaks, hits torrents
A beta version of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 has apparently leaked onto the torrent networks, if you're exceptionally brave and fancy installing a knock-off version of a major OS update.
The intrepid can take some slight reassurance from the information that it can be uninstalled, so your Windows …
Student's brilliant idea: A peer-to-peer social network
Benjamin Birt, a CompSci student at the University of St Andrews, has announced a new type of social network, which he calls PeerBook. We note that there are some folks in Hamburg who might want to chat to him about the name and an international academic working group who might like a quiet word about this being a whole new …
RISC OS runs on fastest hardware ever
RISC OS is alive and well and running on the fastest hardware it's ever been on – and the kit only costs £120. But "kit" is the operative word...
Acorn may sadly be no more than a brand name attached to fairly generic netbooks now, but Acorn's products are thriving. The Acorn RISC Machine, later renamed the Advanced RISC Machine …
The Reg guide to Linux, part 3
Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It's approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and …
Oracle updates free web RAD tool
If you have to knock up a web front-end to an Oracle database in a hurry, you might appreciate the newly-released version 4 of Oracle Application Express – or APEX, as it's known to its mates.
Version 4 has been a while coming – it's been in preview since December and the last version, 3.2, came out in March last year. Formerly …
Getting the most out of Gmail
So long as you don't mind the company indexing all of your mail and keeping it forever – plus the odd, easily-ignorable advert - Gmail is one of Google's handiest services. It's got probably the best interface of any webmail system, it scales down well onto smartphones and so on, but it does rather more besides. You can use it …
The Reg guide to Linux, part 2: Preparing to dual-boot
On Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with …
Apple iOS4 upgrade adds multitasking, folders... and pain
As usual, the latest Apple operating system upgrade is stranding quite a few unhappy users with broken machines. This time it's iOS4, which was released for some older iPhone models on Monday.
Apple's products often appeal to non-technical users and some are getting bitten when they try to upgrade. Whereas any half-competent …
The Reg guide to Linux, part 1: Picking a distro
One of the common complaints about Linux is that there are too many different editions (or “distributions”) to choose from, and only a hardcore nerd can tell them apart.
Well, it's true, but you can safely ignore 99 per cent of them. Welcome to The Register's guaranteed impartiality-free guide. Tomorrow, we'll tell you how to …
Linutop 2
A whole heap of companies have started offering miniature Linux-powered PCs in the last few years, from Zonbu, Sumo and Koolu to DecTOP, that sells the device formerly known as AMD's Personal Internet Communicator. A number bear an almost suspicious resemblance to x86-powered thin clients, being based around inexpensive, low- …
