Monthly Archive:: October 2007

Project Indiana, Sun Microsystems' Linux-like OpenSolaris effort, will begin shipping to developers before the end of October, the company announced Oct. 15 at its open-source summit press event here. The developer release will include Image Packaging System, a new package manager slated for inclusion in the next version of Solaris, but won't be back-ported to Solaris 10, the most recent version to ship, said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems platform strategist, in an address to the media. All of the technology developed under Project Indiana will be delivered through OpenSolaris going forward, he said. The full release is expected in March. More here.

Drobe pitches the A9Home against the Koolu Net Appliance. "The A9home has won the hearts of some RISC OS users, but how does it fare in the big bad world of embedded and small-form factor computing? David Llewellyn-Jones pits his Advantage Six A9home against the Koolu Net Appliance to find out."

Apple has revealed Leopard's releast date to be 26th October, confirming earlier rumours. "Packed with more than 300 new features, Mac OS X Leopard goes on sale Friday, October 26, at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, Apple announced today. And, beginning today, customers can place pre-orders on Apple's online store."

The Syllable project has published the first two preconfigured virtual machine images for trying out Syllable Server without installation. One is for VMware . It can also be used with QEmu and VirtualBox. The other is for other emulators such as Bochs, or also QEmu . The latter unpacks to a file of one gigabyte. Detailed instructions are here. Also, for history purposes, two images were published of the last version of AtheOS, Syllable's predecessor . Here is a screenshot of AtheOS running on Syllable.

"When Red Hat announced its upcoming Linux desktop at its annual summit in May, the company predicted the Red Hat Global Desktop would be out by September. Now, delayed a bit, the new desktop Linux will be appearing in November, company executives are saying. The delay was caused, Gerry Riveros, Red Hat senior product marketing manager for enterprise Linux, said in an exclusive interview with DesktopLinux.com, by Red Hat's desire to support Intel's full PC hardware platform lines."

"A few weeks ago, the OpenBSD Project announced that the Portable C Compiler had been added to the OpenBSD source tree. There has already been some explanation of why the traditional GNU Compiler Collection is troublesome and why a new compiler is needed, but there are still some details left uncovered. In this interview, Theo de Raadt and Otto Moerbeek of the OpenBSD Project offer more information about PCC and GCC and where they are headed within the project."

The GNOME version of Mandriva Linux 2008 One has been released and is now available via BitTorrent or from the mirror sites. Featuring all the same new features as the other editions of Mandriva Linux 2008, with a fully up-to-date GNOME 2.20 desktop. In addition, another review of Mandriva 2008.

This week's 'big' news on OSNews was about software patents. You know, those things that say you cannot stack four pixels on top of one another unless you pay money to the guy who invented four-pixel-stacks (or the guy who bought the guy who invented four-pixel-stacks). A company called IP Innovation, LLC, has sued Novell and Red Hat for infringement of the company's IP portfolio. Software patents are of course generally completely ridiculous, so I will not focus on that here. I want to focus on something else.

"The openSUSE team officially released version 10.3 on October 4th. openSUSE is a popular German Linux distribution that Distrowatch.com lists as one of the 'top ten'. Underneath its new green artwork, version 10.3's improvements over previous versions include cutting down the time it takes to reach the graphical login screen; speeding up and streamlining its package management utility; and making it easier for users to install software using a new 'one-click install' process."

Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Michael Dell. Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando on Thursday, Dell's chief executive officer said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft's claims. "On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows," said Dell. "We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down."

Groklaw reports that a company called IP Innovation, LLC, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Novell and Red Hat. Groklaw goes into black helicopter mode, trying to find a tie between this IP Innovation thing and Microsoft - and it finds it too. A few ex-Microsoft employees now work at IP Innovation. Do with it as you please.

"It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell."

The release candidate for Ubuntu 7.10 has been released. "The Ubuntu developers are hurrying to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software that the open source and free software communities have to offer. This is the Ubuntu 7.10 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features. We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user. The final stable version will be released in October 2007."

Red Hat is taking a business-as-usual stance in the face of renewed rumblings from Microsoft's Steve Ballmer over the need for Red Hat Linux users to pay up. Ballmer has repeatedly claimed that Microsoft IP is found in Linux. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us," said Ballmer at a Microsoft event last week in London. But Red Hat itself has adopted a stance that keeps it above the Microsoft patent fray. "At this point, please reference our previous statements on this topic," said a Red Hat spokesman contacted Tuesday about Microsoft's statements on Red Hat Linux users. The spokesman pointed out a Red Hat blog posted "after the last FUD statements from Microsoft" in May, she said. Shuttleworth agrees.