Microsoft Capitulates on Vista

Microsoft has agreed to make a number of changes to Windows Vista in response to guidance from the European Commission, the EU's competition regulator. It has also had successful talks with competition authorities in Korea who raised concerns about Microsoft's business practices. It expects to ship Vista on time in that country as well. Here's a summary of Microsoft's explanation of the changes that will be made in Windows Vista. Microsoft says the changes will apply worldwide.

Installing SLED 10 on the ThinkPad T60p

"The Lenovo ThinkPad T60p is the first ThinkPad to officially support GNU/Linux. Unfortunately that support is not quite as broad as some would like - you're more or less forced to install and use SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. The good news is, SLED 10 is a highly usable, stable, and configurable operating system. Officially you're supposed to buy a support contract from Novell if you need help installing the operating system on a ThinkPad T60p, but if you'd prefer to do it on your own, this guide will walk you through the process."

Microsoft Opens up Access to Virtualization Format

Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday that it is making its virtualization file format available for free and without a license. At an interoperability conference in Brussels, the software giant said that its Virtual Hard Disk Image Format specification can be used by third parties without the need for them to get a commercial license. The virtualization technology will be available under the terms of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, which it introduced in September.

Sun To Deliver Self-Contained ‘Blackbox’ Data Centers

"Whenever IT managers complain about their jobs, one of the things that always tops the list of their complaints is the time, money, and annoyance that comes from simply integrating the servers, storage, and networking gear they acquire. If integration is a big pain point, then so is building out data centers. In many cases, companies simply do not have the power and cooling to add more gear to their data centers without causing a meltdown. Enter Sun with Project Blackbox."

KOffice 1.6 Released

The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application.

NVIDIA Graphics Driver Blob Root Exploit

A recent security advisory announced today by Rapid7 explains, "the NVIDIA Binary Graphics Driver for Linux is vulnerable to a buffer overflow that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code as root. This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely (via a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page). A working proof-of-concept root exploit is attached to this advisory." The advisory goes on to note that the FreeBSD and Solaris binary drivers are also likely vulnerable and cautions, "it is our opinion that NVIDIA's binary driver remains an unacceptable security risk based on the large numbers of reproducible, unfixed crashes that have been reported in public forums and bug databases."

Fedora Core 6 Release Postponed Again

Fedora Core 6 has been delayed again. "Over the weekend we ran into a few more bugs with Fedora Core 6 that we decided were important enough to fix. There were some multilib compose issues (wrong packages landing in the wrong dirs), some translation files that would cause tracebacks in things like anaconda (whoops), and a fedora-release package that forgot to enable updates (double whoops). For these reasons and a few others, we decided to respin the release candidate tree and push the release date out another couple of days."

Yellow Dog Linux Announced for Playstation3

Yellow Dog Linux 5 has been announced. Surprisingly, it will first be released for Sony's Playstation 3, and then later for PPC Macs. Yellow Dog Linux 5 for the Playstation 3 will use E17 as its desktop environment (YDL's page on E17), which will be a boost to E17's adoption rate. Sony had mentioned the PS3 would include Linux in some capacity, but it has been unclear how Linux would fit into the rest of the system.

IBM/Lenovo, Apple Top Support Firm’s Hardware Reliability Ratings

Who makes the most reliable computers? Lenovo, closely followed by Apple, if you believe online service and support company Rescuecom's latest reliability audit, derived from more than 20,000 calls made by the firm's customers during the second quarter this year. Rescuecom assigned a reliability rating to computer vendors. Lenovo, in its guise as provider of IBM desktops and notebooks, scored 243. Apple attained 201. Third-placed HP/Compaq scored a mere 12. Dell's rating was 4, Gateway -12 and all the rest together scored -16.

Firefox Accepting Feature Suggestions for Version 3

"The Firefox web browser has come a long way since the project was announced as a fork from the open-sourced Mozilla project. Version 1.0 was released in 2004 and quickly won critical acclaim for its speed, compatibility with web standards, and features. In a couple of years, Firefox managed to reach a milestone that its predecessor never quite reached: hitting 10 percent market share worldwide. Version 2 of the browser recently hit RC2, but the team is already making plans for 3.0. The Mozilla organization has set up a feature brainstorming web site that allows everyone to enter their favorite wish lists for the open source browser."

NEC Confirms Packard Bell Sale

NEC confirmed that it was exiting the European PC market, announcing it had reached a deal to sell its Netherlands-based Packard Bell subsidiary to Chinese entrepreneur Lap Shun 'John' Hui. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Although a popular brand of computers in for a short period of time in the mid 1990s worldwide, Packard Bell quickly was eclipsed by competitors, mainly for a reputation of lackluster quality and poor customer support.

Multi-Boot Vista/Linux/OS X/BSD from the Vista Bootloader

NeoSmart has just released EasyBCD 1.5, complete with support for Vista, Windows NT/2k/XP, and Windows 9x/ME. EasyBCD 1.5 adds experimental support for dual-booting any of these along with Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD - straight from the Windows Vista bootloader without any additional configuration needed. "Windows Vista's new bootmanager is a double-edged sword. It's one of the most powerful booting scripts in existence, and a far cry from the very limiting boot.ini of legacy Windows operating systems. But it overwrites the MBR without a second thought, and doesn't provide any means for users of alternate operating systems and boot managers to use their old system. That's where EasyBCD 1.5 comes in!"

Microsoft Opening up Vista Kernel to Security Vendors

"Microsoft has compromised with security vendors who've been demanding access to the kernel of the upcoming Vista operating system so that they can update their security offerings, two analysts confirmed Friday. Following conversations with the European Union, Microsoft will make two security-related changes to Vista. First, it will create a new set of APIs, which will let third-party security vendors access information from the kernel. Microsoft will also build additional APIs to make sure Vista's security status dashboard - Windows Security Center - doesn't send duplicate alerts to users who have installed a rival dashboard."

The Future of ReiserFS

With Namesys founder Hans Reiser recently arrested as the prime suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife, a brief thread on the lkml discussed the future of ReiserFS.According to a report at Linux.com, employees at Namesys are circling their wagons and plan to continue working on the project 'in the short term.' One employee admits, "we are rather shaken and stressed at the moment, although I cannot say we didn't see it coming."