Thom Holwerda Archive

The Debian GNU/Linux project today admitted a hacker had compromised one of its internal servers. "Early this morning we discovered that someone had managed to compromise gluck.debian.org," Debian developer James Troup wrote in an e-mail to the Debian community. "We've taken the machine offline and are preparing to reinstall it," Troup continued, noting a number of key services were currently offline as a result.

"Microsoft alerted us this time about seven vulnerabilities of which five were rated critical and two important. There are vulnerabilities in the Server service, the DHCP Client service, Excel and Office that could allow remote code execution."

Darbat, the L4/Darwin port, has just had its second public release. Darbat Release 0.2 boots natively on Apple Intel EFI hardware and offers binary compatibility with Intel OS X applications and IOKit device drivers. Simple Darbat system call performance is comparable with that of Mac OS X 10.4.6. You can download the source or a binary distribution to boot a simple demo on hardware. The release notes contain an overview of the Darbat design and implementation.

"Xandros Desktop Home Premium Edition is the most complete desktop GNU/Linux distribution on the market today, but it still has a few holes in it. If you want to play commercial DVD movies, use an unsupported wireless network card, watch WMV video clips, or install software that isn't in Xandros Networks, the default install will not be sufficient. This guide will show you how to add all of these capabilities to your Xandros Desktop Home Edition 4.0 installation."

"With the release of FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1, the second quarter of 2006 has been productive." The status report contains a lot of information about (for example) DTrace, Embedded FreeBSD, GJournal, XFS for FreeBSD, and the new BSDInstaller.

PCMag reviews iWork '06. "For word processing, the Apple iWork '06 Pages program is no match for Microsoft Word or ThinkFree Office 3.0. But it's capable, and its ability to create gorgeous documents easily is unequaled on the Mac." My take: I concur. iWork is the best tool for the job when you need to create a document you yourself will distribute physically; however, since iWork uses a closed file format only iWork users can read, distributing it electronically is fairly useless.

A set of major changes in SkyOS is now complete. The entire GUI subsystem was rewritten to support desktop composing including flicker free drawing, double buffering, full alpha transparency, plugable composing effects, etc. Secondly, PE support has been dropped completely, and all libraries, applications, drivers, and the kernel are now ELF binaries. Thirdly, everything is now compiled with GCC 4.1.1 and the latest binutils. And last, but personally definitely not least: SkyOS now has support for BeOS people files. Other than the above, a lot of bugs were fixed as well.

Speaking at a forum in South Africa regarding a plan for Microsoft to make major technology investments in the country, Bill Gates said there was an "80 percent chance" Windows Vista would by ready for its planned January launch. He also had no qualms about delaying the OS further if necessary.

Belenix 0.4.4 has been released. "This release marks one more important step for OpenSolaris LiveCD performance. After a couple of months of hacking and testing this release includes an enhancement to the HSFS filesystem module that improves CDROM access time by upto 30%. In addition a bunch of work is going around packaging so the next major release should be complete with packaging based on Pkgsrc." Get it at their download page.

Microsoft has - finally - announced its version of on-demand CRM software. For more than a year the software giant has nosed around the fact that it's working on customer relationship management as a service, but it wasn't until its annual Worldwide Partner Conference here July 11-13 that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live made its formal debut.

From today, Microsoft will no longer issue security updates or provide support for Windows 98 and Windows ME, which could lead users to trying alternative operating systems such as Linux. Eight years after launching Windows 98, Microsoft will finally wash its hands of updating and plugging security gaps in its ageing operating system. The software giant originally planned to pull the plug in January 2004 but decided to extend support because of the increasing threat from Linux.

"If you use your laptop in many different locations, you must be tired of having to configure your network manually every time. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a nice alternative, but what can you do in places where DHCP is not an option. Guessnet is the right tool for that job."

Ars reviews Parallels Desktop for MacOS X, and concludes: "People pondering the switch to a MacBook can rest assured that with the exception of USB device support and hardware accelerated 3-D applications, their needs will be well met by this little workhorse of a program. Between the networking that just works, the impressive speed and the inability of the client operating systems to know they are running within a 'virtual machine', I think you'll be hard-pressed to find software for any x86 OS that doesn't work within a Parallels VM."

The European Commission plans to raise the ceiling of future fines on Microsoft to 3 million Euros (USD 3.8 million) a day if the company continues to defy an antitrust decision, a diplomatic source said on Monday. He was speaking as European competition regulators met to discuss the amount of a fine the European Union's executive arm will impose on the software giant for failing to comply with the 2004 decision that it abused its dominant market position.