Monthly Archive:: December 2006

Jeremy Allison Resigns from Novell in Protest of Patent Deal

Submitted by John Mills 2006-12-21 Novell and Ximian 85 Comments

Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls 'a mistake' which will be 'damaging to Novell's success in the future'. His main issue with the deal, though, is "that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence, it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally." He leaves the company at the end of this month.

GNOME 2.17.4 Released

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2006-12-21 Gnome 17 Comments

GNOME 2.17.4 has been released. "This is our second development release on our road towards GNOME 2.18.0, which will be released in March 2007. New features are coming in at a nice rate, and that's great. A lot of bug fixes too. And some crashers are appearing here and there: that's the fun of unstable releases!"

Has the Desktop Linux Bubble Burst?

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-21 Wayland 275 Comments

In 2002, both KDE and GNOME released their last major revisions; KDE released KDE 3.0 on 3rd April, while GNOME followed shortly after with GNOME 2.0 on 27th June. For the Linux desktop, therefore, 2002 was an important year. Since then, we have continiously been fed point releases which added bits of functionaility and speed improvements, but no major revision has yet seen the light of day. What's going on?

Submitted by nedvis 2006-12-21 SuSE, openSUSE 29 Comments

In the seven weeks since Microsoft and Novell announced their controversial interoperability and patent protection agreement, Redmond has handed out some 16000 subscription certificates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Redmond is also trumpeting the fact that several of its existing enterprise customers - such as Deutsche Bank AG, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies - are among the first to take advantage of these certificates and the interoperability between Windows Server and SUSE Linux.

Submitted by deanlinkous 2006-12-21 Linux 34 Comments

"Irish Free Software developers Brian Brazil and Paul O'Malley have developed a new distribution, appropriately named gNewSense. Made with the philosophy of Debian and the structure of Ubuntu, it aims to be the freest distribution out there. It's so 'free', that it earned an official endorsement from the Free Software Foundation. Linux Online is grateful to Messrs. Brazil and O'Malley for taking time out of their busy schedules to answer a few questions about their project."

eSATA: Faster External Drives to Arrive

Submitted by Matt Johnson 2006-12-21 Hardware 21 Comments

eSATA, an external version of the technology that's used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives. Great for storing photos, video and music.

Submitted by Valour 2006-12-21 Internet 52 Comments

BSD and Linux programmers have had a lot of success in creating drivers for new computer hardware in a timely manner, but much of their effort has been without the support of major hardware manufacturers. Intel, Marvell, Texas Instruments and Broadcom, though separate and competing entities, seem by one consent to prevent non-Microsoft operating systems from working properly with some of their most widely-used network chips.

Submitted by mkools 2006-12-20 Oracle and SUN 58 Comments

Project Looking Glass has hit the magical 1.0 mark: "This release is the culmination of 3 years of work, starting with Hideya san who originally conceived of a bold, new type of window system, through the initial shake down of the proof-of-concept demo by an internal Sun community, followed by the open sourcing of the technology, which generated such enormous interest that it brought down the java.net servers several times. From that point on many people from around the globe have contributed to the project; contributing to the core, contributing applications, performing testing, writing and translating documentation, etc. The project owners (Hideya, Paul, Krishna and myself) are very grateful for all of the great contributions we have received from you, the LG community."

Windows Vista and Protection from Malware

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Windows 43 Comments

"On November 30, Sophos issued its monthly report on the top ten threats reported to them in November of 2006. As a part of this, Sophos also studied Vista's vulnerability to these malware threats. I found the information and press discussion confusing, so I thought I would clarify what this really means for customers. In order to understand what was really going on here, I asked the team to go look at the technical facts behind the story, and that started in the lab. We began by observing first-hand how these various forms of malware affect a Vista system using a machine that was configured with the default settings and without any additional security software. What we found was that if you are using only the software in Vista (e.g., Windows Mail and no add-on security software), then you are immune to all ten of the malware threats that Sophos cited."

Outlook 2007: Linux and Open Source

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Linux 15 Comments

"In the year to come, we expect to see Linux maintain its torrid development pace, with major new enterprise releases from Red Hat, which is set to ship RHEL 5 in January, and Novell, which will also ship an update to its Open Enterprise Server early next year. What's more, we expect to see one or two new releases from each of the all-free leading-edge distributions we track - including Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE - alongwith new developments from the swelling horde of smaller Linux flavors, inboth commercial and noncommercial quarters."

Mozilla Issues Security Updates

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Mozilla, Gecko 16 Comments

The Mozilla Foundation has issued 'critical' security updates tovulnerabilities discovered in the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mailclient and SeaMonkey application suite. Flaws were found in versions of theopen-source software prior to both Firefox 2.0.0.1 and Firefox 1.5.0.9, aswell as prior to Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.0.7, Mozilla saidTuesday.

Citrix Snags Embedded OS Provider Ardence

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 OS News No Comments

Citrix Systems on Dec. 20 will put another piece of its Dynamic DesktopInitiative into place when it announces its plannedacquisition of Ardence. Ardence, a privately held company that marketsembedded real-time operating system software and a software streamingplatform for Windows and Linux, brings to the table real-time provisioningmanagement for operating systems.

What’s Next for AMD?

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 AMD 6 Comments

"In a series of announcements and conference calls, culminating in a recentanalyst meeting, AMD has been slowly revealing pieces of the big pictureregarding where they plan to take their platforms in the coming years. I'vebeen following the coverage, and I've put togethera synthesis of it below."

New Leopard Screenshots

Submitted by Arcenius 2006-12-20 macOS 25 Comments

Not too long ago Apple released a new build of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, to select testers. AeroXP now has some screenshots of this new build. They report, for one thing, that even though it is available, ZFS is not actually working in this build. Update: ThinkSecret has more screenshots and an overview.

Submitted by milek 2006-12-20 Solaris 1 Comment

"Solaris Cluster provides high availability and global disaster recovery to suit the evolving needs of virtually any datacenter in any industry: across local distances, campuses or metropolitan areas, and across the world, ensuring business continuity without compromise. With out-of-the box support for the largest number of commercial and open-source applications, open and flexible configurations for both horizontal and vertical scaling, integration with the Solaris kernel and support on both SPARC and x64 platforms, Solaris Cluster provides industrial-strength high availability to your applications." There's documentation too.

Coming in January: ‘Month of Apple Bugs’

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-20 Apple 45 Comments

A pair of security researchers has picked January 2007 as the starting point for a month-long project in which each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X or in Apple applications that run on top of it. The 'Month of Apple Bugs' project, currently slated to begin on Jan. 1, is being orchestrated in part by a security researcher who asked to be identified only by his online alias 'LMH'. This is the same researcher who in November ran the 'Month of Kernel Bugs' project. LMH's partner in this project is Kevin Finisterre, a researcher who has reported numerous bugs to Apple over the past few years. As with the kernel bugs project, Apple will be given no advance notice with the Month of Apple bugs, LMH said.

Lazy Programming and Evaluation

Submitted by IdaAshley 2006-12-20 General Development 25 Comments

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Man Boots Mac OS X on Asus UMPC, Shoots Video

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 macOS 34 Comments

Apple's Mac OS X has been successfully used to boot up an Asus R2H ultra-mobile PC, which runs the operating system slowly but surely. To minimise claims that all the still photography is faked, the start-up process has been captured on video.

A Survey of Linux File Managers

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 Linux 54 Comments

"Linux file manager ontogeny encapsulates the history of GNU/Linux. File managers began as command-line and generic graphical tools and progressed to desktop-specific ones, gaining sophistication along the way, with mouse controls, for example, replacing buttons. Today, the more than a dozen options highlighted here will suit users with widely varied interests."

Google Axes Search API

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-19 Google 25 Comments

Google has quietly axed the web services API to its eponymous search engine. The stealth move was made without any announcement, but visitors to the page now receive a blunt message, backdated to 5 December, advising them that the SOAP API is no longer supported.