Eugenia Loli Archive

Sun announced the availability of its new Operating System, branded Solaris on a range of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon-based systems. The Solaris OS will now run on a variety of servers, workstations, notebooks and "other products," which Sun is hoping will let it extend its reach, and find its way into the OS market.

As Microsoft works to get the Windows client and server security packs out the door, it's also pushing the software's existing authentication and access control facilities--namely, public key infrastructure (PKI) and digital rights management services (RMS)--to get customers to batten down the hatches.

It's hard to imagine that Linus Torvalds could have launched Linux without directly using earlier OS work, according to a report that has become controversial even before its scheduled publication Thursday.

FSF, the leading free software group has vowed to fight portions of a request to release information that could help the SCO Group in its legal battle against Linux.

Red Hat is the latest Linux company to challenge Mircosoft's hold on the business desktop space with the introduction of Red Hat Desktop, the latest addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family. Matthew Szulik, the company's chief executive, chairman and president met ITWeek to discuss Red Hat's latest efforts and share his views about the Linux landscape.

Red Hat's Seth Nickell is making his argument why including Mono on Gnome is an unacceptable legal risk down the road. Our Take: So much is being said that there is no written proof that MS won't sue over C# in the future, even if C# is an ECMA Standard. What I don't understand is why Red Hat's and Novell's laywers don't even try to extract that assurance from Microsoft in the first place and have a definite answer (and let us know too). This industry works via legal and contract co-ordination, it's time the Linux companies put that into work too: call a meeting and clear this up. It's that easy.

Defragmentation on HFS+ volumes should not be necessary at all, or worthwhile in most cases, 'cause the system seems to do a very good job of avoiding/countering fragmentation, says KernelThread.

The Subversion development team has released version 1.0.3. This is a security bugfix release and the team suggests all Subversion users upgrade: "Subversion versions up to and including 1.0.2 have a buffer overflow in the date parsing code. Both client and server are vulnerable. The server is vulnerable over both httpd/DAV and svnserve (that is, over http://, https://, svn://, svn+ssh:// and other tunneled svn+*:// methods). Additionally, clients with shared working copies, or permissions that allow files in the administrative area of the working copy to be written by other users, are potentially exploitable."

QNX was the first realtime operating system (RTOS) vendor to certify conformance to POSIX.1. Compared to the conformance claimed by other RTOS vendors based on earlier POSIX editions, the 2003 edition of the specification triples the scope of programming interfaces required for conformance. To become POSIX certified, the QNX Neutrino RTOS will be tested with more 1,300 POSIX interfaces. Full certification is expected to be achieved within six to twelve months.

Apple Computer plans to continue rapidly bringing out new versions of Mac OS X, but it won't continue at quite the pace it's maintained in recent years. Also, Apple Computer got hit by a double whammy this week when a security researcher publicized a pair of flaws in Mac OS X that when used together could let attackers place a malicious program on a Mac and then run the file, News.com reports.

The European Council on Tuesday approved controversial changes to the European Union's Software Patents Directive that will pave the way for widespread patenting of software in Europe.

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server division, in an interview last week discussed the road map for future operating system releases, the competitive threat posed by Linux and the promise of 64-bit computing. Part 1 of the interview is here.

Businesses, not hobbyists, are the main contributors to embedded Linux, yet open source participation is growing as companies discover the benefits of shared development. This is one of several key findings from a survey of embedded Linux developers conducted jointly by MIT and the University of Munich.

Peter Loforte, general manager of the Tablet PC team, shows us what is cool about the upcoming Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 software update (code-named "Lone Star.") This is a free update and will automatically come with the upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2.