Red Hat’s Cox Warns on Open Source Security

Privacy, Security 49 Comments
Alan Cox, one of the most respected figures in the UK open source community, has warned of complacency over the security of open source projects. Speaking to delegates at London's LinuxWorld conference on Wednesday, he emphasised that considerable sums of money were being spent to try and hack into open source systems. And he cautioned that many open source projects were far from secure. "Things appear in the media like open source software is more secure, more reliable and there are less bugs. Those are very dangerous statements," Cox said. My take: Agree wholeheartedly. Security complacency, often seen in OSNews' comments sections, is very, very dangerous.
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Novell Announces PCs Preloaded with SUSE Linux

SuSE, openSUSE 44 Comments
Wouldn't it be great to just get a PC with Linux already installed and ready to go? Novell thinks that's a grand idea too, and on Oct. 25 announced agreements with four white-box PC manufacturers who will globally distribute PCs preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Novell's new PC vendors are European manufacturers ETegro Technologies, MAXDATA and Transtec, along with the U.S. PC OEM R Cubed Technologies. Each will sell notebooks and/or desktop PCs preloaded with SLED 10.
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MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo) Performance Comparison

  Submitted by jfpoole Benchmarks 11 Comments
Geek Patrol has benchmarked the new (Core 2 Duo) MacBook Pro against the old (Core Duo) model. "Moving from the Core Duo to the Core 2 Duo means 32-bit MacBook Pro performance is up 10% without an increase in processor clock speed. That’s impressive! Even more impressive is the Core 2 Duo is 20% faster (when executing 64-bit code) than the Core Duo (when executing 32-bit code)."
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In the Future, the Past Won’t Be Present

Office 43 Comments
History tends to leave behind mostly two kinds of information - the irrelevant and the biased. Archaeologists are either digging up people's thrown away junk, or reading some emperor's pompous account of his great deeds. The archaeology of the future will involve carefully extracting random 1s and 0s off of media and theorising what it all could mean. In the reckless and fast moving digital world, many stumbling blocks have been created that would drastically inhibit future generations learning about our ancient digital existence.
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Oracle Linux Uncovered

  Submitted by M-Saunders Databases 28 Comments
"Yesterday Oracle announced the release of their own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, simply called Enterprise Linux or 'Unbreakable Linux'. In a remarkably similar move to such projects as CentOS, Oracle have decided to remove all Red Hat specific trademarks and brand it as their own (all quite legit, of course). They will be supplying bugfixes for this new version, and will also be synchronising it with future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We decided to take a peek at what Oracle had come up with. Read on for a first-look, and the Linux Format team's opinions." In the meantime, Mark Shuttleworth said a partnership with Oracle is no longer a matter of if, but when.
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Ubuntu 6.10 Released

  Submitted by thebluesgnr Ubuntu 59 Comments
The Ubuntu team announced the release of Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed 'Edgy Eft'. Highlights for the desktop include GNOME 2.16, Firefox 2.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, Gaim 2.0 and two new applications, F-Spot and Tomboy. This release also features a pre-release of the upcoming LTSP-5, as well as the usual updates of the base system, with GCC 4.1.1, Glibc 2.4 and Linux 2.6.17. There's a screenshot tour already, while Mark Shuttleworth commented on the news concerning Oracle and Linux. Update: The first review in what will probably become a long list. Update II: Kubuntu 6.10 is released as well.
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PC-BSD May Be the Next Linux

  Submitted by Charles A Landemaine PC-BSD 65 Comments
"With all of the BSD variants available for download, it's easy to incorrectly assume all of them are pure, incompatible forks from each other. Actually, there are more shades of BSD out in the world than just separate forks. One in particular made the news a couple of weeks ago when it was commercially acquired. The BSD in question is PC-BSD. The company that bought it is iXsystems, a systems deployment and integrator firm out of San Jose that has pretty strong experience implementing *BSD, Unix and Linux systems for its customer base. So, why did the company up and buy PC-BSD?"
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OpenSUSE 10.2 Beta1 Released

  Submitted by Carlos SuSE, openSUSE 19 Comments
"OpenSUSE 10.2 Beta1 contains a large number of enhancements and updates done by the open source community and Novell's development teams. I'd like to point out especially the following significant changes for OpenSUSE 10.2 from our list of updates of all open source subcomponents, integration of new subcomponents and improvements in various areas: Linux Kernel 2.6.18.1; glibc 2.5; Firefox 2.0; GNOME 2.16.1; KDE 3.5.5; X11 R7.2 RC; both KDE and GNOME feature improved start menus compared to upstream; improved desktop effects (compiz 0.2)."
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Novell Says Desktop Linux Costs At Least USD 300 Less than Vista

  Submitted by Rob Novell and Ximian 18 Comments
Novell said on Wednesday that its recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop will cost users over USD 300 less than Microsoft forthcoming Windows Vista operating system, and encouraged users to look at their desktop operating system options. Novell UK's technical director, Brian Green, laid out the list pricing for SLED and Windows Vista. Green said a business Vista license will set users back USD 299, compared to USD 50 for a one-year subscription to SLED.
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FreeVMS 0.2.15 Released

  Submitted by mariuz OS News 13 Comments
FreeVMS is an OpenVMS-like operating system which can run on several architectures like i386, PPC, Alpha, and many others. It consists of a POSIX kernel and a DCL command line interpreter. The only architectures currently supported are i386 and x86-64. Version 0.2.15 got released Monday.
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Mac OS X 10.4.8 Runs on Generic x86 – Sort of

  Submitted by Governa macOS 13 Comments
Mac OS X 10.4.8 will now run on any generic x86-based PC. Well, almost. Kernel coder Semthex has posted what he claims is an entirely legal release of the Mac operating system's foundation layer. The only snag: you can't boot into the familiar GUI. To date, the version of Mac OS X for x86 processors has relied on kernel add-ons to anchor the software to Apple's own hardware through the machines' Trusted Platform Module. Much of the core code is independent of it, however, and available for access to all and sundry via Apple's own source code licence. What Semthex has claimed to do is produce code that essentially bypasses the TPM stuff yet stays within the Apple licence.
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Oracle’s Red Hat Rip-Off

  Submitted by Anonymous Databases 57 Comments
"No one saw this coming. People talked about Oracle making its own Linux, or buying a Linux company (Ubuntu?). But, the news that Oracle is erasing Red Hat's trademarks from Unbreakable Linux and supporting it for less than Red Hat is a bolt from the blue. Or, perhaps, I should say that Oracle is firing a shot at the heart of Red Hat, and commercial Linux? This really, really ticks me off." Apparently, Oracle announced that they will provide full enterprise support for Linux and so it competes with RH.
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Wozniak: Apple Didn’t Need NeXT, OS 9 More Secure Than OS X

macOS 78 Comments
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple did not need NeXT, the company that provided the foundation for Mac OS X; he argues that System 7 wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be. Wozniak also says that Mac OS 9 was more secure than OS X is now: Mac OS X is built in Unix and is therefore more prone to attacks because people are familiar with the holes in Unix, explained Woznaik. "Some of the holes in Unix are well known. So keeping Firewalls on is more important. And we keep announcing, even our own security fixes, not as many as Microsoft but still we never really had those in the OS 9 days."
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