Showing headlines posted by red5

Last week, Linux was tagged with a local NULL pointer flaw that could have led to a privilege escalation issue. Linux founder Linus Torvalds pushed a patch upstream quickly and now that patch is in the Linux 2.6.31 -rc6 milestone. Torvalds notes in the 2.6.31 rc6 releases notes that the issue wasn't as bad as it could have been, and that he would have likely delayed the fix were it not for the fact that a private list, apparently wasn't private after all.

The issue of how long a Linux distribution will support a release is one that tends to go back and forth. Novell's openSUSE Linux is now revising its policy. Starting with the openSUSE 11.2, maintenance support will be approximately 18 months which is reduction of 6 months from what openSUSE 11.1 and prior offered users.

What is the most popular programming language used by open source developers? The answer depends on how you define popularity. According to a new study from Black Duck, a software-license code analysis vendor, C represents more than 40 percent of all code written for open source software. Black Duck made its determination by counting the actual lines of code. While C is the leader by that measure, PHP and JavaScript are on the rise when you look at the broader picture of how open source projects use programming languages.

With the Oracle VM Template Builder, Oracle is opening up its virtualization technology to build software appliances for any type of software. Sitting underneath the hypervisor technology is Oracle's JeOS, which Kumar explained is a version of Oracle's Enterprise Linux tailored specifically for Oracle VM template. "Basically, it is something that is only applicable for building Oracle VM templates," Kumar said. "It is not something that we directly support for users to deploy as an operating system."

Acquia has raised $15 million in funding and they're putting it into dev for their next gen open source content management system. A key part of that is a new cloud based service powered by Drupal 7.

Linux system management comes in from the cloud, but it's still not entirely open source. While there is a mad rush toward putting more IT resources into the cloud, not everything belongs in the cloud - Just ask Ubuntu Linux vendor Canonical. The Canonical Landscape Ubuntu systems management server is now moving in from the cloud with a new dedicated on site offering. Previously the Landscape service was only available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud based model. The new Canonical Landscape Dedicated Server expands the commercial support offerings available for Ubuntu Linux as Canonical ramps up its efforts to gain market share against rivals.

It's not everyday that there is a public security exploit published for the Linux kernel, yet that is what happened in early July. Though the flaw itself was patched in the mainline Linux kernel several weeks prior to the public exploit code being published, not all users may have patched. It could have been a lot worse. The issue of patching aside, the public exploit could easily have been a zero day exploit on the Linux kernel itself, were it not for the fact that the bug that enables the exploit was caught by a scan from code scanning vendor Coverity. The Linux kernel has been actively scanned by Coverity since at least 2004 in an effort to find bugs and improve code quality

Intel's Wind River subsidiary is now the leader in embedded Linux, at least when it comes to revenues, according to the market analysis by VDC Research. Wind River, which was acquired in June by Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) for $884 million, has more than 30 percent of the total market revenue for embedded Linux, VDC found. Rival MontaVista Linux sees another story.

When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, many (myself included) saw it as the real coming of age of Linux. While there is little doubt that IPO was a big event for Red Hat and Linux, perhaps an even more important one from a milestone point of view will officially occur this Friday. As of Friday July 24, Red Hat will join the S&P 500 index. In my opinion this is a major milestone for Red Hat and for Linux.

Microsoft has signed another patent licensing agreement with a Linux using vendor. In this new case, Microsoft has signed a deal with Melco Group the group that owns tech vendor Buffulo Technology. The deal specifically deals with Buffalo's NAS (network attached storage) devices as well as Buffalo routers - both of which run Linux. The real problem here (among others) is the fact that neither party is expressly stating what patents are involved.

The race for the fastest Linux boot has been going on for about a year at this point and now we've got a new winner. Embedded Linux vendor MontaVista today is announcing the demonstration of a 1 second Linux boot. In contrast the fastest production Linux releases today are in the 20-25 second range. To be fair, MontaVista's Linux with the 1 second boot is embedded and designed specifically for the Freescale Semiconductor MPC5121e hardware built on Power Architecture technology. That's not to say they can't get the same performance on other architectures, it's that is the hardware on which the first 1 second boot is being demonstrated.

In the wake of Chrome OS, what will it take for Linux to succeed in the netbook market? Linux Foundation, Ubuntu and openSUSE respond... "Linux will naturally capture more share on netbooks as Microsoft economics prove unrealistic for this market," Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at the Linux Foundation told InternetNews.com. "Microsoft as it existed for the past 20 years does not fit into a world of free carrier-backed netbooks and an Internet OS."

From its initial creation out of what was once the Red Hat Linux distribution, Fedora has always been a fast moving distribution. As part of that fast moving approach, older releases don't live all that long. The current policy is that releases will live only until one month after the N-2 (next two) release is out. Fedora 11 came out one month ago and now its time for Fedora 9 to go away. Only problem is - there are still 3 million users of Fedora 9.

Gerry Carr, platform marketing manager at Ubuntu, downplayed the news, telling InternetNews.com that, at this point, all Google has delivered is a blog post stating its intent -- and as a result, it's too early to speculate on how the competitive landscape will shape up. "I think we would rather focus on a new entrant bringing a bunch of energy to the open source space and validating the choice of Linux for developing new operating systems that will replace legacy Windows," Carr said. "But by whom and how that Linux choice will be delivered is predicting the future with little data -- not something that is smart to do."

Google's Android mobile OS is not the only OS up Google's sleeve. Google announced late Tuesday that it is working on a Linux based Chrome OS as an operating system for the web. Don't rush out to Google to download Chrome OS today - Google doesn't expect to have it available to consumers until the second half of 2010.

What is the operating system of the cloud? Linux vendor Red Hat would like it to be Linux, while for networking giant Cisco, there are multiple operating systems. "We don't want the functionality of the network to work only in one cloud OS," Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said. "So, from that point of view, we are neutral." Warrior added that Cisco is going to make sure that their cloud initiatives work with multiple operating systems, including Red Hat and its Linux offerings.

While both Red Hat and Canonical/Ubuntu are offering cloud services, Canonical is not providing a certification program like Red Hat is for vendors. While Red Hat sees value in certification, Canonical does not. "At this time, we believe there is limited user value for certifying a public cloud provider which has already delivered a considerable brand for operational excellence in public cloud provision," Simon Wardley, head of Canonical's cloud strategy said.

In total, PostgreSQL 8.4 includes 293 enhancements from the previous 8.3 release, an update that was primarily centered around performance. "There is no performance change [that] affects all users equally across the board," PostgreSQL project core team member Josh Berkus told InternetNews.com. "However, there are several changes with dramatically improve performance for several specific common use cases."

Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.

Red Hat CEO Whitehurst noted that Red Hat has yet to lose a major customer to Oracle and that all of its top 25 deals each quarter for the last five quarters have renewed. According to Whitehurst, the only major Red Hat customer that has not renewed due to Oracle's Linux in the last couple of years was Oracle itself. "I think with the addition of Solaris, I think it would be an even harder sell of something that's already proven pretty unsuccessful for them," Whitehurst said. "I wouldn't want to be the sales guy compensated on selling Oracle Unbreakable Linux."