OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Free Download of Yellow Dog Linux 5.0

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-28 Games 21 Comments

Those who intend to install a Linux distribution on a Sony PlayStation 3 will be pleased to learn that Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is now available for free download. Originally released on 27 November, Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 is a Fedora-based distribution tailored to run on Sony PlayStation 3. It features a graphical installation program and includes the Linux kernel 2.6.16, X.Org 7.0 (3D acceleration not supported), Enlightenment 17 as the default desktop (KDE 3.5.3 and GNOME 2.14 are also available), Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 and other popular open source software applications for desktops, servers, media playback and software development.

Submitted by frik85 2006-12-28 ReactOS 4 Comments

Apart from a new newsletter, ReactOS has also published its sixth interview with one of the developers. Art Yerkes, born in Philadelphia, PA, USA in 1974. He's been involved with ReactOS since 2002 and contributed primarily to the keyboard code in win32k and the network code. Lately much of the work has been networking related, as well as slowly giving birth to a PowerPC architecture port.

Shuttleworth: Plan, Execute, Deliver

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-28 Ubuntu 29 Comments

Mark Shuttleworth writes: "We are a somewhat chaotic crowd, the software libre army. Thousands of projects (hundreds of thousands, if you consider Sourceforge as a reference point). Hundreds of thousands of contributing developers from virtually every country and timezone. We are a very loosely coupled bunch. But sometimes I wish it were easier to keep track of changes and have a slightly clearer view of progress across that whole galaxy." Eugenia agrees.

Submitted by elsewhere 2006-12-28 Linux 76 Comments

"Proprietary kernel modules are flaky, out of date, and the bane of a Linux professional's existence - right? Maybe not. This three-part (part I | part II | part III) series makes a case for formalizing the uneasy truce between GPL-clean and 'tainted' modules."

Amsterdam, The Hague, Among Others, Say ‘Enough’ to Microsoft

Submitted by patrik uytterhoeven 2006-12-28 Open Source 31 Comments

"In February 2003, the program 'Open Source and Open Source Software for the Dutch government' started, funded by the Dutch government. One of the main tasks was to make the government independent from single software suppliers, among which are Microsoft and SAP. After three years, the effort starts bearing fruit. Ten big municipalities - together 2.7 million inhabitants and including Amsterdam and The Hague - signed a manifest. I'll try to explain what's in the manifest, what that might mean for the future, and for the monopoly of Microsoft in the Dutch government."

User-Friendly Virtualization for Linux

Eugenia Loli 2006-12-28 Linux 37 Comments

The upcoming 2.6.20 Linux kernel is bringing a virtualization framework for all virtualization fans out there. It's called KVM, short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Not only is it user-friendly, but also of high performance and very stable, even though it's not yet officialy released. This article tries to explain how it all works, in theory and practice, together with some simple benchmarks.

FreeBSD 6.2-RC2 Released

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-12-27 FreeBSD 30 Comments

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 6.2 has been released. "All problems we felt needed to be addressed before 6.2 could be released have been taken care of. Unless further testing turns up something new RC2, which is available now for dowloading, will be the last of the Release Candidates and 6.2-RELEASE should be ready in about 2 weeks."

AIX 5L LDAP User Management: Active Directory Client Support

Submitted by bluevoodoo 2006-12-27 Unix No Comments

Get an overview of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-related enhancements in the AIX 5L operating system V5.3 TL5 update. This lets clients configure and manage multiple systems with a single set of user identity configuration information, and it simplifies system administration.

Report: Apple Executives Faked Stock-Option Documents

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-27 Apple 32 Comments

Apple's stock took a hit Wednesday after a report that company executives had made up details on stock-option administration documents to guarantee profits for certain executives. The report said falsified documents were unearthed by Apple's internal probe into the matter. Earlier this year, Apple said it had identified concerns with two former executives as a result of its investigation into its accounting for stock options, and the report names former chief financial officer Fred Anderson and departed general counsel Nancy Heinen as the subject of the probe, although it's unclear whether they are the ones thought to have falsified the documents.

Cellphones on a Budget: Reviews of the SLVR L7 and LG U8500

Eugenia Loli 2006-12-27 Wireless 21 Comments

After a month of furiously shopping gifts for your friends and family, you might want to get a small gift to yourself, a cellphone on the budget. Hi-Mobile sent us in for a review two extremely affordable cellphones that don't lack features. The first one is the popular Motorola SLVR L7 (just $140) and the other one is the less popular --but with 3G and web capabilities-- LG U8500 (aka U880, just $180).

Submitted by gireesh 2006-12-27 Zeta 34 Comments

The magnussoft ZETA 1.5 Pro is a major upgrade over the ZETA 1.21. It provides lots of new features and enhancements like SAMBA, multi-user, new device drivers etc. The product can be pre-ordered for 29 Euros and it has an expected shipping date of 2007/01/15.

FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter December

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2006-12-27 FreeBSD 20 Comments

This FreeBSD newsletter covers the foundations recent activities, such as the 2006 fund raise campaign, the network stack virtualization project, the FreeBSD/sun4v and FreeBSD/arm projects, Java for FreeBSD, BSD conferences and a new 10Gigabit network testbed.

Submitted by Sphinx 2006-12-27 Windows 102 Comments

Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month. On Dec. 15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user’s privileges on all of the company’s recent operating systems, including Vista. Update by Thom: Ars thinks the situation is hot air, mostly, something I agree with (a cracker already has to have login credentials for the flaws to be of any use).

Submitted by russellb 2006-12-26 Internet 16 Comments

The Asterisk dev team has released Asterisk 1.4.0, the first in the 1.4 series. The Asterisk project releases a major version about once a year. This series includes T.38 Fax over IP passthrough support, HTML manager, a new version of AEL (Asterisk Extension Language), IMAP storage of voicemail, Jabber/GoogleTalk integration, a jitterbuffer for RTP, whisper paging, and many more other new features.

Why Windows Rules the World

David Adams 2006-12-26 Windows 214 Comments

An Economist.com editorial examines the OS lay of the land on the eve of Vista's release, and makes an interesting case for why Windows "rules the world". Do you agree? We report, you decide.

Working Example of an Interview (Qt4 MVC Framework) Model

Thom Holwerda 2006-12-26 Qt No Comments

This is a first of a series of articles which aim to provide a complete and working example of an Interview (Qt4 MVC framework) model. The model is to hold information about a 3D scene for use with OpenGL renderers like QGLWidget. The first thing to do when designing a model is to thing what is the purpose of making it. In this case, I want the model to store information about a 3D scene which can then be rendered using OpenGL (QGLWidget). The scene is to consist of some objects, which can be defined using various ways offered by the OpenGL specification. Part 2 and part 3 are also published.

Get the Most Out of Z Shell

Submitted by bluevoodoo 2006-12-26 General Development 7 Comments

Examine key parts of the Z shell (zsh) and how to use its features to ease your UNIX system administration tasks. Z shell is a popular alternative to the original Bourne and Korn shells. It provides an impressive range of additional functionality, including improvements for completing different commands, files, and paths automatically, and for binding keys to functions and operations.

2006: a Year of Surprise Linux Partnerships

Submitted by Jane Walker 2006-12-26 Linux 2 Comments

"It has come to be expected. Linux and open source news in 2006 was a potpourri of topics that included Windows-Linux interoperability, wild acquisitions and corporate spending sprees and stories of enterprise-level companies buying into open source and Linux en masse. Even better than that, many of yesterday's Linux and open source stories listed below still have the legs to become tomorrow's big news all over again."

Various Ways of Detecting Rootkits in GNU/Linux

Submitted by Ravi 2006-12-26 Privacy, Security 16 Comments

"A rootkit is a collection of tools a hacker installs on a victim computer after gaining initial access. It generally consists of network sniffers, log-cleaning scripts, and trojaned replacements of core system utilities such as ps, netstat, ifconfig, and killall. I know of two programs which aid in detecting whether a rootkit has been installed on your machine. They are Rootkit Hunter and Chkrootkit."

Submitted by falko 2006-12-26 Debian 8 Comments

"This guide is written during an install of a Supermicro machine with 2 dual-core opterons (64-bit), 2 identical disks (for RAID) and a load of memory. Why OpenVZ and not XEN or the recent KVM kernel module? Well, XEN is not very stable for 64-bit architectures (yet), and it comes with quite a bit of overhead (every VM runs its own kernel) due to its complexity. KVM is very simple but restricts you to run a kernel as one process, so the VM cannot benefit from multi core systems."