OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

OpenOffice.org Less Secure Than Microsoft Office?

Submitted by Tom Magnum 2006-07-18 Office 35 Comments

OpenOffice.org has been increasing in both popularity and visibility over the past several months. Version 2.0 has added a number of new features to bring it closer to feature parity with Microsoft Office, and it also offers full support for the Open Document format. However, a report just released by the French Ministry of Defense says that it still falls short of Microsoft's office suite in one important area: security.

OpenVMS – a System of Structure

Guest post by Robert Gezelter 2006-07-18 OS News 68 Comments

In its initial concept, OpenVMS (then VAX/VMS) sought to provide the functionality and capabilities of a mainframe-class system at a small fraction of the size and cost, while at the same time providing higher levels of reliability and integrity. These goals were achieved by what has become OpenVMS' hallmark, an emphasis on integrity and architectural leverage. Note: This is an entry to our OS Contest.

Microsoft, XenSource To Develop Interoperability for Longhorn

Submitted by Patrik Buckau 2006-07-18 OS News 33 Comments

"Microsoft and XenSource today announced they will cooperate on the development of technology to provide interoperability between Xen-enabled Linux and the new Microsoft Windows hypervisor technology-based Windows Server virtualization. With the resulting technology, the next version of Windows Server, code-named 'Longhorn', will provide customers with a flexible and powerful virtualization solution across their hardware infrastructure and operating system environments for cost-saving consolidation of Windows, Linux and Xen-enabled Linux distributions."

Microsoft’s Private Folders Become a Public Headache

Submitted by Troy Drossi 2006-07-18 Microsoft 29 Comments

Microsoft's effort to provide a little privacy for Windows users has instead turned into a very public black eye. There was a near-immediate outcry saying that, without proper safeguards, what was intended as a benefit could turn into a big headache for businesses. The software could make it harder for companies to meet compliance regulations as well as to handle users who forget their password, critics said.

Sun Boots Server with Niagara II Chip

Submitted by Elloit Cannovi 2006-07-18 Oracle and SUN 8 Comments

Sun has booted its Solaris operating system on a server with a prototype of its forthcoming Niagara II processor, one key milestone for the company's attempt to restore the relevance of its Sparc processor family. The first Niagara chip, formally called the UltraSparc T1, is used in the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers that have come to market in recent months. Niagara II keeps its predecessor's relatively low 70-watt power consumption and extends its ambitious design elements, multiple processing cores and execution threads.

Submitted by Dolphin 2006-07-17 Windows 78 Comments

"Microsoft has just released the latest installment of the Windows Vista pre-RC1 builds, with Vista Build 5472.5 making its way to TAP and Tech Beta tester today, and for once, MSDN Subscribers too. Build 5472.5 is a standard FRE Staged build, only available in English at the moment, though Arabic, Japanese, and German builds may follow. At this point all the builds we are seeing seem to undergoing severe stages of heavy optimization: although faster code normally comes at the expense of larger files as a rule of thumb, this build of Windows Vista packs a punch performance-wise, but is only a 100 MB larger than its predecessor. "

Submitted by Valour 2006-07-17 Oracle and SUN 17 Comments

"After suffering through version 1.0 many years ago, I thought Xandros would be the least likely of the commercial desktop GNU/Linux distributions to succeed. Each subsequent release since 1.1 has changed my mind a little bit, and now with version 4.0 of its home desktop edition, I'm at last convinced that Xandros is positioned for success. This should be the desktop operating system that you recommend to your Windows-hating friends and family."

Tracker: Desktop-Neutral First Class Object Database

Submitted by EJB 2006-07-17 General Development 38 Comments

"Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer. Tracker is also extremely fast and super efficient with your systems memory when compared with some other competing frameworks. It consists of a common object database that allows entities to have an almost infinte number of properties, metadata, a comprehensive database of keywords/tags and links to other entities. It has the ability to index, store, harvest metadata. retrieve and search all types of files and other first class objects."

How to Restore a Hacked Linux Server

Submitted by anonymous 2006-07-17 Linux 27 Comments

"Hopefully you never had to restore your own system from a compromise and you will not have to do this in the future. Working on several projects to restore a compromised Linux system for various clients, I have developed a set of rules that others might find useful in similar situations. The type of hacks encountered can be very variate and you might see very different ones than the one I will present, or I have seen live, but even so, this rules might be used as a starting point to develop your own recovery plan."

Application-Level Virtualization for Windows

Submitted by Tal 2006-07-17 Windows 9 Comments

A company called Trustware, who has recently been nominated one of the 10 hot start-ups of 2006 by Microsoft, developed an application-level virtualization tool for Windows. This app, called BufferZone, promises to fight malware virtualizing I/O operations, so that the OS and user's data will be safe. Another cool advantage of this technology is that it doesn't require any user interaction. SecurityFocus published an interview with Eyal Dotan, creator of the tool, where he discusses the architecture, advantages of this design, performance, and how this method could be applied to servers running Windows or be ported to other OSs.

Submitted by Eugenia Loli 2006-07-17 Geek stuff 22 Comments

"Artificial intelligence is 50 years old this summer, and while computers can beat the world's best chess players, we still can't get them to think like a 4-year-old. This week in Boston, some of the field's leading practitioners are gathering to examine this most ambitious of computer research fields, which at once has managed to exceed, and fall short of, our grandest expectations."

MorphOS: The Lightning OS

Guest post by Fulvio Peruggi 2006-07-17 Morphos 56 Comments

The latest article in our OSNews OS contest: Learn about MorphOS, the heir to the Amiga legacy. This article chronicles its bumpy history, its still-compelling features, and the current state of MorphOS development.

Submitted by AdamR01 2006-07-17 SuSE, openSUSE 53 Comments

Since yesterday, .iso downloads for SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop/Server 10 have been available from Novell's download page. After seeking confirmation from Novell's Nat Friedman, we can confirm these are indeed the final releases. SLED 10 is available for x86 and x86-64, while SLES 10 can be obtained for x86, AMD64/EM64T, PPC, IBM Power, Itanium, and IBM's zSeries. According to Friedman, a "big marketing blitz" will happen today. OSNews reviewed the RC3 release of SLED 10 in two stages not too long ago.

Sharpdevelop 2.0 Released

Submitted by Bernhard Spuida 2006-07-17 General Development 24 Comments

The Open Source IDE Sharpdevelop 2.0 has been released. This IDE not only allows you to code in c#, VB.NET, and boo, but also offers features you won't find elsewhere: conversion between the supported programming languages, support for .Net and Mono, Winforms, and GTK#. View the full feature tour or download Sharpdevelop and start into open source development for both Windows and Linux in one IDE.

Submitted by gergnz 2006-07-17 OS News 8 Comments

Lots of news on Xen. Firstly, "This is a document about how to set up XEN and iSCSI on 3 Debian Stable machines so that you can have a virtual host that can be migrated live between 2 of the machines. The third machine will be the common disk for the virtual machine that is seen via the 2 machines running XEN." Secondly, "IBM and Novell are throwing their considerable weight behind Xen, but some experts are suggesting that these companies may be pushing this nascent technology too far too fast." Lastly, "You can now run OpenSolaris domains under Xen as dom0 with OpenSolaris domUs too."

Windows Fundamentals Screenshots, Information

Thom Holwerda 2006-07-16 Windows 55 Comments

Bink.nu has more information and screenshots on Windows Fundamentals. "Microsoft Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is a Windows-based operating system designed for enterprise customers with legacy PCs who are not in a position to purchase new hardware. WinFLP provides the same security and manageability as Microsoft Windows XP SP2 while providing a smooth migration path to the latest hardware and operating system."

Freespire Beta 1 Released

Submitted by jake tate 2006-07-16 Linspire 87 Comments

Kevin Carmony of Linspire/Freespire has announced that the first beta of Freespire has been released earlier than anticipated. Get it from the download page. According to Carmony, this release includes out-of-the-box support for proprietary formats such as .mp3 and WMV, plug-and-play support for Ati and nVIDIA cards without user intervention, Click-N-Run, and much more.

Submitted by falko 2006-07-16 Ubuntu 8 Comments

"VMware has just released version 1.0 of its free VMware Server. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install the free VMware Server on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS."

Multipurpose Multimedia Processing with GStreamer

Submitted by anonymous 2006-07-16 Multimedia, AV 13 Comments

"This article introduces you to GStreamer, a universal multimedia processing library that makes multimedia handling easy. GStreamer can answer many problems, such as 'I need to store all audio samples coming from various sources in a common format'. Because all formats are treated alike, you only need to write one tool. This saves time and makes the solution more robust and easier to maintain. Moreover, after you learn the GStreamer concepts, there's almost no limit to what you can apply it to."

Shared Source Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 Release

Eugenia Loli 2006-07-16 Wireless 9 Comments

The Shared Source Device Emulator is a compressed archive of the source code to the Device Emulator V1.0, buildable using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The Device Emulator is a software simulation of an ARM CPU and motherboard, that runs the Windows CE and Windows Mobile operating systems. This source release can be used as an research and experimentation platform: the CPU emulator can be modified or replaced, as can the motherboard, peripheral devices, and emulator UI. If ported to Unix it will make easier the development, debugging and testing of ARM-compiled Qtopia and Linux-based applications for phones/PDAs.