Monthly Archive:: December 2004

From all of us here at OSNews, Happy New Year! 2005 promises to be an exciting year in technology - what surprises do you think this year will hold? What news do you think will top the technology news sites in 2005 - Linux? SCO? Microsoft? Firefox? Security? Wireless networking? A destructive new worm? Share your thoughts here.

"I've been running the recently released Deluxe Edition of Xandros Desktop OS for the past week. Xandros 3 has proven to be all that I hoped for, and more. This release should prove a good fit for many, combining the ease of use and elegant good looks that Xandros brings to the table with the underlying power and stability of Debian." Read the rest at NewsForge.

Systems architect and engineer Judith Myerson explains the ins and outs of wireless robots: their components, their shortcomings, and how they can interact in a competitive or cooperative team within professional environments. Learn how smarter robots can relieve us of the most tedious -- and dangerous – tasks.

Microsoft is not planning an upgrade to Internet Explorer until at least 2006, when the next version of Windows is released. The company is busy building and testing a faster (and more secure) version, and Jim Allchin, head of the Windows platform division, says, "We have a very, very innovative set of capabilities that we're putting in the next version."

This review takes the 10.1 Official release through its paces during a month of operation. Rather than give an at-a-glance review, LinuxForumsDOTorg sends Jeremy on a 30-day journey using Mandrake 10.1 Official to bring you this review.

TextOS is a small operating system for text-based applications which runs on a floppy. Built on top of FreeDOS, it runs programs made with the TextOS BASIC programming language. TextOS has been out for about a month, but it is only now in working condition. For more information see the official TextOS website.

2004 has been a rough-and-tumble year for Linux. PC Pro has a month-by-month summary of the major events in Linux news over the year.

ThinkSecret discusses the possibility of a cheap, headless Mac, similar in scope and target to the one we wishfully thought all the past year.

The open source Derby database engine provides developers with a powerful new tool for lightweight database development. Derby databases are file system based and portable across different types of systems. Because of this, a common strategy is to create databases at development time and ship them with the binary distribution as opposed to having it created on the fly.

Last week a new worm started spreading on the Internet. It's named Santy, and it attempts to deface websites using specific versions of the popular phpBB bulletin board software. Is this just a run-of-the-mill worm causing minor damage to a few thousand websites? Yes. But it's also got something we've never seen before.

"Xandros Linux is among a handful of Linux distributions truly worthy of naming a desktop Linux distribution. Today, there are many distributions out there calling themselves desktop operating systems, and even though most of them are very good attempts, many fall short... but not Xandros." Read the rest of the review here.

The transparent real-time file-level protector - VitalFile for Real-Time Workstation Protection has a new version available for free download. Version 1.1.0.6 now has full system protection including replication of all changed files on a configurable schedule and version-tracking on remote file server. Vaulting allows lock-down of files or directories in an intelligent WORM fashion.

Clicking on a hypertext link while viewing a PDF file shouldn't be a security problem as long as you trust the viewer it invokes. But users of xpdf version 0.90 discovered that this assumption was an extremely bad one. When an xpdf user clicked on a hypertext link, xpdf started up a viewer (Netscape by default) and sent the URL to the viewer. So far, so good. But the xpdf developers decided to start up the viewer by using the system() call. That was the bad idea..

Firebird V1.5.x is the first release of the Firebird 2 codebase and represents a significant milestone for the developers and the whole Firebird project, but it is not an end in itself. With these release, major development continues toward the next point release on the journey to Firebird V2.0.