Monthly Archive:: September 2007

Global expansion and strong Enterprise Linux subscriptions have lifted Red Hat to double-digit growth as the CEO confirms Red Hat's solution and services provider transformation. Red Hat reported profit of USD 18.2 million, or USD 0.09 per diluted share, an increase of 64 per cent year on year for the second quarter of the company's fiscal year, which ended August 31.

KernelTrap offers a summary of a lengthy debate on OpenBSD's -misc mailing list comparing the security features built into OpenBSD versus the security offered by the Linux kernel's SELinux feature. The main arguments presented against SELinux centered around its complexity and the difficulty of defining a secure policy. "The first thing people usually do with SELinux is turn it off", suggests the article, noting that the ease with which it can be turned off is another security shortcoming. By contrast, OpenBSD offers numerous security features that are always enabled with minimal overhead, including propolice stack protection, random library mappings, proactive privilege separation, W^X, and systrace.

Geeks.com sent us in the JVC GR-D347US camcorder for a review. Read on for more and check some test footage for this cheap digital camcorder, possibly the cheapest miniDV model in the market today.

The internet is abuzz with the news that Apple intends to break iPhones containing third party applications. Unlocked phones are also likely to be victims of the next software update. While community reaction is generally negative, one blogger suggests sending an even stronger message to Apple by boycotting Apple on October 1. If you're running the Installer application, you may want to hold off on any iPhone firmware updates.

Tedd Gallion, speaking on behalf of a group called the DiscreetFX partners, has sent out a letter to the Amiga community with quite an interesting topic: to buy out the AmigaOS4 and the Amiga brand from Amiga, Inc. The letter states that DiscreetFX and its partners have contacted Amiga, Inc., but that the company asked a completely insane amount of money. DiscreetFX and its partners now ask the community to contact Amiga, Inc., and urge them to sell the Amiga OS and its brand to DiscreetFX for a fair price. "Urge Amiga Inc. sell to us for a fair price. We will end the lawsuit, we will end the fighting., we will end the madness. If we were in charge Amiga OS 4.0 would be available today on SAM." Spelling and grammar weren't exactly a priority in the letter, so credibility is a bit dubious. The credibility has been more or less confirmed.

Microsoft said that Office 2008 will come in three versions. The "core" version, Office 2008 for Mac, including all the applications plus Automator and Microsoft Exchange Server support, will cost USD 399.95, with a USD 239.95 upgrade price. Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student Edition will allow three user licenses, but it won't include the Automator and Exchange Server support. It will cost USD 149.95 for the retail version, with no upgrade pricing announced. New to the lineup will be Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition, which will add Microsoft Expression Media for Mac, a revised version of the iView Media digital asset management utility. iView was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. This version will cost USD 499.95, with a USD 299.95 upgrade price.

Critics who blasted Microsoft three months ago for failing to deliver Windows Vista add-ons have again called the company on the carpet, this time for missing its self-imposed deadline to provide promised extras. In late June, bloggers and users were already panning Vista Ultimate Extras as a bust. Extras, available only to customers running the top-end Vista edition, was one of the features cited by Microsoft to distinguish the USD 399 operating system from its USD 239 cousin, Home Premium. Microsoft's online marketing, for instance, touted Extras as 'cutting-edge programs, innovative services, and unique publications' that would be regularly offered to Ultimate users.

"The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 1.4 (da Vinci edition)! This release is made available via the efforts of many developers and testers, who have spent the past months refining and improving upon the core PC-BSD experience." This release comes with Xorg 7.2, KDE 3.5.7, Compiz-Fusion 0.5.2, support for Flash7, and much more. There are release notes, a changelog, and downloads.

Just weeks ahead of its public launch, Apple has updated the minimum system requirements for its next-generation Leopard operating system to exclude 800MHz PowerPC-based Macs, AppleInsider has learned. Apple has yet to officially announce the hardware requirements to run Leopard, due out in October, but had long stated in developer documentation that the software would require "an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (800MHz or faster) or G5 processor." According to people familiar with the matter, engineers for the company recently determined that Leopard installs on 800MHz PowerPC G4 systems ran "too slow". Support for those systems was subsequently pulled from the most recent pre-release copies of Leopard, which inform testers that the software "cannot be installed" on those computers. My take: Assuming this turns out to be true, there are going to be a lot of unhappy G4 owners - including yours truly.

While the kernel 2.6.23 development cycle has not yet run its course, things are getting close enough to the end that it makes sense to start looking at the overall statistics for this release. As of this writing (shortly after 2.6.23-rc6 came out), just over 6,200 non-merge changesets had been added to the mainline kernel repository. These changesets came from 854 developers - a slightly smaller number than we saw for 2.6.22. Just over 350 of those developers contributed one single changeset. On a related note, LWN.net has a number of reports from the Linux Kernel Developer's Summit.

Monsoon Multimedia, which was subjected to the first US lawsuit on non-compliance with the GPL, has published a press release in which they agree to make any modifications public and thereby complying to the requirements stipulated in the GPL license. "Monsoon Multimedia today announced efforts to fully comply with the GPL. Monsoon is in settlement negotiations with BusyBox to resolve the matter and intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. Monsoon will make modified BusyBox source code publicly available on the company web-site in the coming weeks."

"Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market." This is the conclusion of the Globalisation Instute, a think tank located in Brussels. Please note this is not a(n) (official) statement from the European Commission.

Just like Eugenia yesterday, I also upgraded my laptop's Ubuntu Feisty installation to Gutsy a few days ago. The upgrade process went completely awry, though, so I was forced to do a fresh install. Not a bad thing, as it gave me the opportunity to take a look at Ubuntu's soon-to-be-released Gutsy Gibbon with GNOME 2.20

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way. Dell and Linux distributors have been working on DKMS for about five years now. Its purpose is to create a framework where kernel-dependent module source can reside, so that it is very easy to rebuild modules. In turn, this enables Linux distributors and driver developers to create driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases. For users, all this makes it easier to get up-to-the-minute drivers without hand compiling device drivers.