Monthly Archive:: October 2007

Firefox Is Going Mobile

Submitted by Rahul 2007-10-11 Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments

The developer team behind Firefox has announced plans to bring a mobile version of the technology to the market in 2008. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web, and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it," Mike Schroepfer, a Mozilla developer known as 'schrep', wrote on the Mozillazine blog.

New Features Discovered in Windows XP SP3: Is It Better Than Vista?

Thom Holwerda 2007-10-10 Windows 72 Comments

"The principal reason given for the tremendous under-the-hood changes to Windows unveiled early this year in Vista was the need to overhaul the security model. Indeed, Vista has proven to be a generally more secure operating system, though some vulnerabilities that apply to ordinary software impact Vista users just as much as any other. But now, software analysts testing the latest build 3205 of the beta for Windows XP Service Pack 3 are discovering a wealth of genuinely new features - not just patches and security updates (although there are literally over a thousand of those), but services that could substantially improve system security without overhauling the kernel like in Vista."

Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dock 1.6

Thom Holwerda 2007-10-10 macOS 70 Comments

"The Dock in Mac OS X is unique in comparison to the user interface of Windows, most Linux distros that emulate the Windows desktop, and previous versions of the Classic Mac OS. Apple has significantly updated the Dock in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here's a look at what's new and different in our 3-page report."

FreeBSD Status Reports for the Third Quarter of 2007

Submitted by Chezz 2007-10-10 FreeBSD 4 Comments

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007. The sixth EuroBSDCon was held in Denmark in September. The Google Summer of Code project came to a close and lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD. The bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching."

Luke Schierer Discusses Pidgin, Open Source, Life

Submitted by irbis 2007-10-10 Internet 7 Comments

"Luke Schierer started using Pidgin (then known as Gaim) in 1999, not long after its first release. He officially joined the project in 2001, after being on the IRC channel and helping out for a few several months. He is now one of the core developers. Somewhere between his full time job working with Linux clusters and his time spent developing Pidgin, he finds time to tell PC World about his life, open source and Pidgin."

SkyOS Beta 6796 Released

Submitted by Coldfirex 2007-10-10 SkyOS 75 Comments

SkyOS Beta 6796 has been released. "This build features a complete new multimedia framework (the ISS), automatic file type sniffing, a new Media Center, new Panel, updated Viewer, new Application Manager and various other applications using the new C++ API. Furthermore: 28 additional API Classes, new and updated libraries, customizable WindUI theme, 220+ fixed bugs including critical boot bug fixes."

Linux Kernel 2.6.23 Released

Submitted by diegocg 2007-10-09 Linux 63 Comments

After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, SLUB is now the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.

Virtualisation in OpenSolaris

Submitted by irbis 2007-10-09 Solaris 16 Comments

"Recently there's been a lot of news about OpenSolaris, more specifically in reference to the great progress made by virtualization technologies in it. In this article, I will examine some of these technologies, and compare them with the state of the art on other platforms."

Mandriva Linux 2008 Released

Submitted by AdamW 2007-10-09 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 56 Comments

Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site (release announcement), and on the network of public mirror servers. 2008 includes all the latest software and enhancements over previous Mandriva releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, a 3D-accelerated desktop (Compiz Fusion and Metisse), Firefox 2.0.0.6, and much more. You can read about the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The release notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Microsoft Aims Patent Guns at Red Hat

Submitted by Rahul 2007-10-09 Microsoft 146 Comments

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property. "People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us," Ballmer said last week at a company event in London discussing online services in the UK.

An In-Depth Look at Puppy Linux

Submitted by anonymous 2007-10-09 Linux 9 Comments

"Guest columnist Howard Fosdick has previously used Puppy Linux to successfully revive 'mature' PCs. Now, he takes a broader, deeper look at the parsimonious distribution and its potential value on normal desktop PCs, covering its features, flexibility, capability to peacefully coexist with Windows, ease of use, and limitations."

Good-Bye NetWare, Hello Linux: Novell Open Enterprise 2.0

Submitted by elsewhere 2007-10-09 Novell and Ximian 18 Comments

"Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it."

Fluxbox 1.0 Released

Submitted by rx182 2007-10-09 Desktop environments 30 Comments

Fluxbox 1.0 has been released. There's a changelog, and a download page, of course. "Fluxbox is yet another windowmanager for X. It's based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. Fluxbox looks like Blackbox and handles styles, colors, window placement and similar thing exactly like Blackbox (100% theme/style compability)."

‘ROX-Filer: a Lightweight File Manager that Rocks’

Submitted by michuk 2007-10-09 OS News 16 Comments

"ROX is one of the genuinely interesting file managers available for the major platforms - GNU/Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows (under Cygwin). As can be inferred from the manager’s website, ROX-Filer is a project aimed to move the best features of RISC OS onto Linux and Unix platforms. Its small footprint and configurability are its unquestionable hallmarks."

NetBSD’s Google Summer of Code 2007 Summary

Submitted by Oliver 2007-10-09 NetBSD No Comments

"NetBSD has been involved in the Google Summer of Code since its conception in 2005. This year we were glad to once again have the oppertunity to introduce a number of students to our operating system, to Open Source software development and get them sponsored by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers. The students working on this year's projects were mentored by various NetBSD developers with extensive experience in the respective work areas."

KDE’s Windows Weapon: KOffice 2.0

Submitted by Sandro Hartley 2007-10-09 KDE 30 Comments

"While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. KOffice 2.0, to be released sometime in the first half of 2008, will be cross platform like many other applications in the KDE suite built with the Qt4 GUI toolkit."

Review: Vista SP1 Beta

Submitted by Corinne Iozzio 2007-10-08 Windows 46 Comments

PCMag takes a look at the Vista SP1 beta, and concludes: "The actual first beta of SP1 may not deserve a fanfare, simply because - like all first betas - it has its own set of issues to resolve. But by the time you can get SP1 on the Microsoft Update site or as part of a new Vista installation DVD, you'll want your PC to have it. Nothing dramatic here, but SP1 is a solid, useful upgrade that makes the operating system a little safer and a little faster."

Review: openSUSE 10.3

Submitted by luna6 2007-10-08 SuSE, openSUSE 66 Comments

A review of OpenSUSE 10.3, which concludes: "While openSUSE's efforts to simplify Linux or Window-fy Linux can be commended, the inconsistency in their implementation is its downfall. Opening applications quickly becomes a chore with the excessive amount of clicks needed to find the application you want. The application browser loads slowly, looks cluttered, and uses icons that are too large. Yast has been improved but still feels slow."

Review: WindowBlinds 6.0

Thom Holwerda 2007-10-08 Graphics 37 Comments

Last week, Stardock released version 6 of WindowBlinds, their Windows skinning suite, which is the first version to include full support for Windows Vista. Stardock was kind enough to provide OSNews with a copy of WindowBlinds 6.0. Read on for some findings.

eBay: ‘Phishers Getting Better Organised, Using Linux’

Thom Holwerda 2007-10-07 Privacy, Security 131 Comments

When it comes to launching online attacks, criminals are getting more organised and branching out from the Windows operating system, says eBay's security chief. eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation, and while the company is not releasing the results of this analysis, it did uncover a huge number of hacked, botnet computers, said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University. "The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. We expected Microsoft boxes," he said.

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