Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Canonical and Red Hat have issued a joint statement regarding Microsoft’s plan to make UEFI Secure Boot a requirement of Windows 8. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation has issued a similar statement.

While KDE 4.0 has been around for nearly four years (and most complaints regarding the initial KDE4 fallout have been addressed) and the last KDE 3.5 stable snapshot (v3.5.10) came three years ago, the Trinity Desktop Environment has issued an official release today to keep the KDE 3.5 desktop living.

Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation announced an Eclipse working group to define an open development standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Together with founding members IBM and Eurotech, the M2M Industry Working Group will establish an integrated development environment for M2M networks, as well as a Linux-based, lightweight communications protocol, based in part on Sierra Wireless' Koneki project and the Lua scripting language.

Canonical certainly delivered some exciting news this week when it announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution is on the way to tablets, smartphones, and TVs. There's no denying that this is big news for Linux in particular and for mobile users in general, but it's not exactly surprising. After all, much as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth might have appeared indifferent to the mobile space in recent months, Ubuntu's new, touch-enabled Unity interface was nothing if not writing on the proverbial wall.

While Skype has now expanded their Linux API support to allow other applications to take advantage of Skype video calls and other features, a few months ago the Skype protocol began to be reverse-engineered by an independent researcher. Skype took action several times against this work.

Security researchers at ESET and Sophos have discovered that hackers have gone out of their way to port an old Linux backdoor Trojan to the Apple Mac OS X platform, extending their reach of computers that they can use as part of their botnets.

LXer Feature: 24-Oct-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Qt logo The plan to give Qt more independence from Nokia took another step forward with the activation of the qt-project.org web site. In September, Nokia announced that it was creating a non-profit foundation which would host the infrastructure for the C++ based user interface framework. Nokia has announced that the infrastructure the foundation is managing has now gone live, a few days before the Qt Developer Days conference in Munich from 24-26 October.

In a statement issued this morning on the company's blog, Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for five years on the desktop instead of the usual three years that a standard long-term support release gets. The company says that the longer duration of desktop support is intended to better serve corporate desktop rollouts.

I don’t know exactly what happened with fellow ZDNet writer David Gewirtz’s Linux server, but I do know it was bad. Really bad. He’s been having constant trouble updating and managing his software. The final straw was when he tried to install some updates to his hosted CentOS, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, and it blew up on him.

Vodacom announced an Ubuntu Linux-based netbook for the developing world, to be initially be launched in South Africa for $188. The Vodafone Webbook offers a 10-inch screen, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, a Vodacom SIM card slot, and a weight less than 2.2 pounds, says the mobile provider....

My studio computer collection includes two custom-built desktop machines and a Hewlett-Packard G60 laptop. As described in my previous article, the primary desktop box has been running an old but rock-steady 64 Studio 2.1 that has recently been replaced by a shiny new 64-bit Arch system. The secondary desktop machine and the laptop are both running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 10.04. However, while I like and enjoy using Ubuntu I hardly require two identical installations of the same Linux distribution, so I decided to replace one of them with AV Linux.

PC makers are being lobbied to install Windows 8 on machines in a way that will afford users the freedom to boot Linux or any other operating system. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging PC users to sign a statement demanding that OEMs which implement Windows 8's UEFI Secure Boot do so in a way that allows individuals to disable it, or that the PC makers provide a "sure-fire way" to install and run an operating system of the user's choice.

The big news in openSUSE 12.1, whose first beta has recently dropped, is the arrival of GNOME 3 – in this case GNOME 3.2. Unlike Fedora, which is already into its second GNOME 3-based release, openSUSE had – thanks to its release schedule – stuck with GNOME 2 for its last release earlier this year. OpenSUSE 12.1 embraces GNOME 3.2 and, like Fedora 16, drops support for the GNOME 2.x line.

Edward Shishkin, the lone developer that took over development of the Reiser4 file-system following the conviction of Hans Reiser, has shared a new update with Phoronix regarding the efforts towards pushing Reiser4 into the mainline Linux kernel. Reiser4 has been in development going back to 2004 and had a promising future until the conviction of Hans Reiser and demise of his Namesys company following the murder of Reiser's wife, but since then it's development has been stagnate. In late 2009 I was told by Edward Shishkin that Reiser4 may go for mainline inclusion in 2010. Before pushing again for mainline integration he wanted to publish an article in a scholarly magazine regarding Reiser4's design in order to facilitate some independent expert review.

LXer Feature: 17-Oct-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Friday's filings indicate a couple of things. First, it is becoming increasingly clear that Judge Alsup does not expect this trial to start on schedule, and second, he is going to give latitude in hearing disputes outside of trial to try to reduce the number of issues to be handled at trial. Consequently, while Oracle filed objections to allowing motions on patent marking and striking of portions of Dr. Serwin's rebuttal report, Judge Alsup is allowing both of those motions to proceed along with Oracle's requested motion to strike portions of the Cox/Leonard reports.

An October 5 press release from The Document Foundation provides a bit of information about a vulnerability that was fixed in recent versions of LibreOffice (LO). The vulnerability sounds fairly serious: "This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted [.doc] file." It was evidently fixed, silently, in versions 3.4.3 and 3.3.4 of LO, which were released in August. The details (such as they are) were withheld "until users have been given time to migrate to the new version", but it isn't at all clear that Linux distributions have put out fixes yet. Worse still, OpenOffice.org (OOo) is vulnerable as well, but there has been no release from that project since January.

There was a time when Microsoft despised open source, because open source essentially meant "Linux," and Linux was a serious threat to Microsoft's operating system business. While that threat remains, open source has become such a big tent that Microsoft increasingly feels at home with a broad array of open-source projects. Nowhere is this truer than in its announced support for Hadoop, the open-source software framework that dominates the Big Data movement.

For the first time ever, the Southern California Linux Expo will host the SCALE Kids Conference, a free and open source event where the community leaders of tomorrow will be able to spotlight their talents and ideas. The goal of the conference is to be as "kid driven" as possible. The event offers a unique opportunity for kids 10 to 16 to see and experience the inner workings of planning, determine the content, and help to steer the direction that the conference will take. The SCALE Kids Conference will take place on Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012 in parallel with the main SCALE 10X conference.