David Adams Archive

openSUSE Linux Seeks More Autonomy From Novell

Submitted by lopisaur 2010-06-24 SuSE, openSUSE No Comments

Ars reports: The developers behind openSUSE are drafting a new "community statement" as part of a broader effort to define a technical strategy for their project. The purpose of the community statement is to describe the kind of collaborative environment that the project wants to create as it refines its technical focus. The full text of the community statement is published in the openSUSE wiki. Additional details about the strategy proposals and community review process are available from the openSUSE News site.

Community Asking Mandriva More Directions

Submitted by E. Hermechals 2010-06-22 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 7 Comments

Following the previous article on the Mandriva situation, the various users communities, notably the French and German ones ( among others, as there is more and more people who express their support with the initiative ) have issued an open letter to Mandriva SA about the future of the distribution, asking for clarification about the possible deal, and their impact on the community.

Submitted by sjvn 2010-06-22 Privacy, Security 37 Comments

A Computerworld editorial takes note of some interesting changes Dell made to the Linux page we linked to last week. They watered down some of their pro-Linux claims, but not as far as you might think.

Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the Oracle Wall of Secrecy

Submitted by Jeremy Prince 2010-06-22 Oracle and SUN 44 Comments

Sometimes, Google's search engine does a better job of telling us about IT vendors than the vendors' own public relations and marketing machines, which are often there mostly to deflect questions rather than answer them. So it is with the next commercial and development iterations of Oracle's Solaris Unix operating system.

Submitted by shaneco 2010-06-22 Privacy, Security 21 Comments

With Windows XP SP2 support ending in three weeks, a new report highlights the security risks that come with running an unsupported service pack.

Submitted by sjvn 2010-06-20 Linux 17 Comments

Hardware companies don't tend to have their own Linux distributions. IBM uses Linux everywhere, but they don't have their own Linux. Dell will be happy to sell you notebooks and netbooks with Ubuntu or a workstation or server with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). But, no major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has had a house-brand Linux... until now. HP has recently bought not one, but two Linux distributions. Surely HP is not getting into the Linux distribution business? Are they?

So Many Mobile OSes, but Microsoft Lacks an iPad Killer

Submitted by fran 2010-06-20 Wireless 47 Comments

Microsoft has Windows Mobile 6.x (on the way out) Windows Phone 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7, Windows Embedded Compact 7 and then Windows 7 for tablet PCs and netbooks. What this bevy of systems is missing is a coherent answer for the tablet form factor. Windows Embedded Compact 7, which is the OS aimed at the mobile sector, isn't yet released, and when it is, it won't have a uniform UI, but will depend on hardware vendors to customize. It's an appealing strategy from the vendors point of view, I guess because they get to differentiate their products from their competitors, but it's not a recipe for success.

MeeGo 1.0 review

Submitted by Rohan Pearce 2010-06-20 Wireless 20 Comments

I recently got to spend some time with MeeGo, an Intel-sponsored Linux distribution designed for netbooks and other mobile devices (such as Nokia's extra-geeky N900 smartphone). I tested MeeGo on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook and I was extremely impressed.

Improving the Linux Desktop

David Adams 2010-06-18 Linux 212 Comments

Linux Magazine has a profile of Daniel Fore and the Elementary project. Elementary is a Linux distro that's committed to a clean and simple user experience, but it's more than a distro - it's actually a multi-pronged effort to make improvements to the user experience for a whole ecosystem of components, including icons, a GTK theme, Midori improvements, Nautilus, and even Firefox. The work that elementary is doing isn't limited to their own distro, and some of their work is available in current, and perhaps future, Ubuntu releases. The results are really striking, and I think it's probably the handsomest Linux UI I've ever seen.

Why an Ubuntu Tablet Won’t Sell

Submitted by Jonathan DePrizio 2010-06-16 Linux 32 Comments

Canonical recently announced that they are developing a tablet version of their popular Ubuntu operating system, slated to be released in 2011. This comes hot on the heels of the release of the Apple iPad, and the rumors that HP plans to release a WebOS-based tablet sometime late 2010. However, Canonical's foray into the tablet arena is fundamentally different from both the iPad and a WebOS tablet, and unfortunately reeks of a company failing to learn from their competitors successes and failures.

Submitted by Develer 2010-06-15 OS News 7 Comments

BeRTOS 2.5 has been released: "This is a major stable release, and provide a brand new support for Cortex-M3 (and many new CPUs), one-click support for many different development boards (Arduino included!), new project examples to bootstrap your development with BeRTOS even faster than before! Don't forget that we have a shiny new preemptive kernel with real time scheduler and really fast context switching!"

Dell Makes the Case for Linux

Submitted by Anonymous Linux Fan 2010-06-15 Linux 40 Comments

Dell has posted a page extolling the virtues of Linux (Ubuntu in particular), with a quick explanation of what Linux is and how it compares against Windows. Of course, the page links off to Dell's various computers that ship with Linux pre-installed.

Windows XP Remote Assistance Exploit Discovered

Submitted by fran 2010-06-15 Privacy, Security 6 Comments

An insecurity expert has has discovered a vulnerability in older versions of Windows which pesky attackers could exploit to take over control of your PC. Somewhat ironically, the vulnerability afflicts the Help and Support Center for Windows XP and Server 2003, which users may still - just about - be able to use to get online technical support.

Submitted by REM2000 2010-06-15 macOS 12 Comments

From the apple site: "The 10.6.4 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It includes Safari 5 and general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes that: resolve an issue that causes the keyboard or trackpad to become unresponsive, resolve an issue that may prevent some Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications from opening, address issues copying, renaming, or deleting files on SMB file servers, improve reliability of VPN connections, resolve a playback issue in DVD Player when using Good Quality deinterlacing, resolve an issue editing photos with iPhoto or Aperture in full screen view, improve compatibility with some braille display."

Ironfox: Sandboxed Firefox for MacOSX

Submitted by andreas 2010-06-14 Privacy, Security 9 Comments

The MacOSX sandbox functionality is not talked about, and there exists almost zero documentation on the subject. As Google Chrome uses it to contain it browser, so could any other app. The goal of the ironfox project is to provide the user with a secured Firefox, but still let the user browse the web without the sandbox interfering. It does this by white-listing all the actions that Firefox may do. Should the user's browser be compromised by a vulnerability in Flash or Java, the sandbox would prevent it from leaking any data or executing binaries, preventing system compromise. To break the sandbox the attacker would likely need to have a exploit for the browser and a kernel exploit that would work within the context of the sandbox. The policy is included in the package and should give the user great insights in the workings of the sandbox. It only works in 10.6 but could be backported to 10.5 without much trouble, as both have the seatbelt/sandbox kernel module.

Seeking New OSNews Contributors and Editors

David Adams 2010-06-11 OS News 49 Comments

Starting next week, Thom Holwerda will be beginning a seven week internship at a Netherlands-based translation firm, so he'll be cutting his OSNews efforts back, and the rest of the OSNews team is going to need to fill in. We've been talking forever about how we need to recruit new editors to freshen up the viewpoints here at OSNews, and I guess there's nothing like a crisis to force everybody to do what they should have done a long time ago. So if you think you have something to contribute to the OSNews effort, read on.

All-Out War: The Computing World’s Battle Lines Are Drawn

David Adams 2010-05-25 Wireless 68 Comments

Over at Daringfireball this past weekend, John Gruber put words to what many people are thinking about after Google's rush of Android announcements and not-subtle Apple-bashing at this week's I/O conference: "all-out war." I agree with Gruber that a good old-fashioned bitter rivalry could be a great thing for the computing world, and for smartphone/handheld fans in particular.

Playable Pac Man on Google Today

David Adams 2010-05-21 Humor 25 Comments

To commemorate Pac Man's 30 year anniversary, Google has not only made a Pac Man-themed Google logo, but it's playable, and shockingly included the Pac Man theme music, which startled, but ultimately delighted, my officemates and me this morning. If you press the insert coin button, Ms. Pac Man joins the party. I do hope, however, that Google refrains from including theme music on its homepage in the future.

New Windows Attacks Outsmart Anti-virus

David Adams 2010-05-09 Bugs & Viruses 56 Comments

According to The Register, "Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender. The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus programs bury deep inside the Windows operating system. In essence, it works by sending them a sample of benign code that passes their security checks and then, before it's executed, swaps it out with a malicious payload."

Politics of Open Source Conference

Submitted by Michelle Sagan Goncalves 2010-05-05 Legal 5 Comments

The Journal of Information Technology and Politics will host JITP 2010: Politics of Open Source on May 6 & 7, 2010 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The conference will also stream live via the conference website. The Politics of Open Source is an interdisciplinary conference that examines the politics associated with the Free/Libre and Open Source Software Movement. The conference features two keynote lectures. The first is by Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Dr. Von Hippel's keynote, "Democratizing Innovation" will discuss the development and impact of democratized innovation systems.