David Adams Archive

"Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now and it's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and how to hack them all."

We've been talking about desktop Linux in the business world for years. in 2008, it seems, a lot has changed and improved, and a lot has stayed the same. A Computerworld article takes a look at the state of desktop Linux in the enterprise, and examines the benefits and the pitfalls, looks at the various vendors and their offerings, and talks about how to work well with Windows and other commonly-used platforms and applications.

"A year ago, page after page of ink was spilled by prophets of doom fretting about the iPhone and how it would surely not be as good as this or that other phone. Were they right or did the first year of the iPhone live up to its hype?"

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister offers a primer in defense of desktop Linux in corporate environments. With tips on choosing the right distribution, migrating to Linux-friendly business applications, and bridging the Windows/Linux divide in heterogeneous environments, the article provides adequate ammunition for assuaging the desktop-Linux fears of cautious corporate types.

Over the years, we've had many people ask if they could join a mailing list that would give them a digest of news from the OSNews site. Though we have made extensive use of RSS that makes it easy for RSS addicts to get their OSNews fix, a lot of people find it more convenient to be reminded of the latest topics by email. We've resisted so far only because we have always had other things higher on the priority list. But wait no more! We now have two lists: one for all OSNews postings, and one only for original feature articles. Currently, the mailing is set to be generated every night. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or requests for the new mailing list service, please post them in the comments. Signup for: Main List or Features-only List.

An article at The Motley Fool lays out good financial news from Red Hat: "In its first quarter of fiscal 2009, Red Hat produced $0.08 of GAAP earnings per share on revenue of $156.6 million. That's a 32% sales increase over last year, while profits held steady. But the numbers don't tell the whole story here.The open-source software veteran released major updates to four of its key products and re-signed every expired contract with its 25 largest subscribers -- for 50% more than the worth of the old deals. It's always cool to see the big boys upgrading their pacts, don't you think? Red Hat continues to invest in its global sales and support infrastructure, funding the growth from organic cash flows.

Erik Huggers, a Microsoft guy at the BBC, takes a look at Fedora 9 as his first Linux desktop and finds it surprisingly good."I am glad that I got a chance to test drive Fedora and as a result have come to believe in the potential of Linux as a mainstream operating system.As Ashley said in this post last year, the BBC does a lot of work with open standards already - but in the future we plan to do more.We want to make iPlayer work on all operating systems including open source ones like Fedora and I am confident we'll make good progress on this before the end of the year."

OSNews is looking for editors and writers to help with posting daily news, writing feature articles, research and investigative journalism, doing interviews, covering events and conferences, writing product and book reviews, doing editorials, and all around increasing the amount of original content published at OSNews. If you are an OS enthusiast and have experience in journalism, blogging, editing, or other writing, please contact David Adams.

The serious tech journalists at XKCD have uncovered some major new security holes in some popular Linux distributions. Note: Coincidentally, after fixing some major hardware issues, Focus Shift is back.

Cnet reports: "Fedora is the operating system of choice for AllemaniACs' winning robot in the RoboCup, a soccer tournament played between robots. Fedora has fueled AllemaniACs' victories in 2006 and 2007, and appears to be poised to raise the cup again in 2008." For anyone interested in using Fedora in robotics, a special interest group for robotics has been started within the Fedora Project to support such efforts.

BBC News reports that Microsoft has come up with an interesting strategy to increase usage of its Live Search service: it is "offering "cold, hard cash" to persuade users to shop online using its Live Search engine and help the company catch up to rival Google. The savings range between 2% and 30% on products sold by select retailers through its so-called cashback service... '2008 is the year that search got competitive,' said Bill Gates."

Infoworld takes a look at Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization system, and finds: "In a nutshell, one of Hyper-V's advertised strengths -- the host partition's ability to work with generic Windows device drivers -- is also its greatest weakness. That's because the quality level of Windows device drivers, especially those from third-party developers, is notoriously inconsistent."

A lot of Windows XP users experienced SP3 aches and pains. This tutorial on PC World has some timely tips on what to do when SP3 installation doesn't go well.

A report on PC World says that Linux vendors Red Hat and Novell's SUSE division have unveiled updates for their enterprise Linux operating systems, adding new capabilities and hardware support in between the next major releases of their products.