Triple Boot on MacBooks Working at Slashdot
The OnMac.net chaps, who shot to fame recently by getting Windows XP to boot on the new Intel Macs, have managed to get triple booting working via BootCamp. In other words, you can now install OS X, Windows XP and Gentoo Linux (other distributions may work, but Gentoo is the one used in the wiki article) on your MacBook and switch between them. At the moment you have to use the NT bootloader to actually boot Linux, but it’s an interesting achievement nevertheless.
The Mozilla team have released another update to the popular Firefox browser, promising “improvements to product stability”, though personally I take that promise with a pinch of salt – improvements to stability have been in the release notes of almost every version I can remember and yet Firefox still crashes regularly for me and leaks memory like a sieve. There’s also native support for the new Macs with Intel processors and fixes for several security bugs. Be warned however, that if you’re using a new Mac you’ll still get updated to the PPC-only build if you use the ‘check for updates’ option, and Talkback (the bug reporting tool) also apparently doesn’t work natively or under Rosetta.
If you’re interested in the details, check out the official release notes and the unofficial changelog. The latter document is more detailed and I’d recommend reading it over the official version if you want to know the specific bugs fixed by the update.
Further coverage
phpBB 2.0.20 released via phpBB.com
A new version of the popular phpBB forum system has been released, fixing a number of issues including several security problems. As always, I’d strongly recommend that you upgrade your forums if you haven’t already, as boards running older versions of phpBB often get exploited quite quickly by people Googling for “phpBB (old version number)” (although this isn’t as easy as it used to be because phpBB doesn’t display the version number by default).
Apple have released version 10.4.6 of the OS X operating system for both Intel and PowerPC models. There’s a lot of issues addressed in the update, although none that I’ve noticed affecting my system. The main change appears to be the inclusion of iSync 2.2, and there’s an important document that you should read before, during and after updating.
PowerPC users should also be aware that your machine will restart twice after installing the update, instead of the one time you might expect. I’m not sure why this is the case, but don’t panic if it happens to you. 
Further coverage
Support the K3b developers via KDE.News
Sebastian Trueg, the lead developer of the K3b CD burner for Linux, is asking for donations to help towards the purchase of new hardware to help with the continuing development of the software. K3b is one of those “essential” applications that I always install on a desktop Linux system, so I hope it gets the funding it needs.
A new version of Adium, the popular multi-protocol instant messaging software for OS X, has just been released. As mentioned on the Adium blog, the release consists mainly of bug fixes, including MSN and Google Talk bugs that were causing me (and presumably other users as well) a lot of problems. I don’t know if the automatic bug reporting facility helped in fixing these (whenever Adium crashes, you can click a button and have it send debugging information to the developers), but I hope it was of some use.
Found this via BeancounterBlog.com: Open Source Mac, a listing of the best free and open source software for OS X, in various categories from web browsing to sound recording. There’s the obvious and well-known pieces of software such as Firefox and Thunderbird, but also more obscure ones (at least that I haven’t heard of) such as Smultron for HTML editing.
The site still appears to be fairly new and isn’t organised too helpfully at the moment, but I’m sure it will improve in the coming months. One of the sites on my “to create” list (which is rather long) was for open source OS X software, so I guess I’ve been beaten to it, although I’ll probably still put mine up at some point.
Adium, the popular multi-protocol instant messaging software for OS X, has updated to version 0.88. Most of the changes are bug fixes for problems that I haven’t noticed myself, but it’s good to see that the software is still receiving regular updates. The major change as far as I can see is that Adium is now a universal binary, which means that it is made to run on Macs with either PowerPC or Intel chips without having to resort to dynamic binary translation.
I was having a look at Google Labs when I came across their Google Extensions for Firefox page. There are the obvious ones listed that most people will already know about, including the Google Toolbar, but the one that caught my attention was the Blogger Web Comments Extension.
Basically what this extension does is allow you to see what people are saying on their blogs about the page you are currently looking at. It does this by querying Google Blog Search, so it’s not limited to only supporting blogs hosted by Google on Blogger accounts. Provided a blog is indexed there, comments from it related to the page you’re currently looking at should show up. You can also post a comment about a page directly to your blog, although this feature only works with Blogger accounts, and you have to be running Firefox 1.5 in order to install the extension (but of course you’ve all upgraded your browser anyway, right?).
I’ve just installed the extension on my copy of Firefox and it produces some interesting results, although I don’t know if I’ll use it very often. It’s a little bit obtrusive at first, but you can always close the comments box it shows and from then on there’s just a little icon near the bottom right of the window, so you’ll barely notice it. For anyone who’s interested in blogging in general, or just receiving some commentary on the pages you’re browsing, the extension is definitely worth the thirty seconds or so required to download and install it.
Web Developer Extension 1.0 via 456 Berea Street
Web Developer Extension for the Firefox and Mozilla browsers has just reached version 1.0. This plugin is incredibly useful for anyone who does web development as it allows you to see how your site looks without images and/or CSS, resizing of the browser window to 800×600 and quick links to all the W3C validators, plus lots of other menu options to help you test web sites. Admittedly a lot of the options are just redirecting you to URLs with the right parameters already supplied, or making available options that already exist in your browser, but it’s so much more productive to have all these features available in one toolbar rather than having to go through all the Firefox menus to edit one preference.
