"Mandriva Linux, once the most popular desktop GNU/Linux distribution, still enjoys an enthusiastic following and a positive cashflow, and has settled into the niche it established in 1999: a technologically advanced operating system that's easy to install, configure, and use without dumbing everything down. Last year's merger with Conectiva and Lycoris more than doubled the size of the company, bringing together hundreds of dedicated and experienced employees to further challenge the Red Hat and Novell desktop GNU/Linux stalwarts. Below are
interviews with three of those everyday people."
"With the advent of Intel-based Macintosh computers, Apple was faced with a new requirement: to make it non-trivial to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware. The 'solution' to this 'problem' is multifaceted. One important aspect of the solution involves the use of encrypted executables for a few key applications like the Finder and the Dock. Apple calls such executables apple-protected binaries. In this document, we will see
how Apple-protected binaries work in Mac OS X."
Submitted by anoynmous
2006-10-24
Wireless
"This whitepaper, fourth in our series leading up to the Nov. 1 official launch of Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007, describes a new set of components that
bring desktop capabilities to Windows XP Embedded. This allows applications to work identically in both desktop and embedded environments and makes the same management, monitoring, and deployment infrastructure available to manage embedded systems."
In the midst of the busy semester here at school, my fiancee's laptop, running Windows XP SP2, picked up some friends - adware, trojans, etc. It was a pretty nasty sight. I worked on it for at least two hours every couple of days, wiping it clean, doing my best to lock it down, and so on. Avast! and Ad-Aware had their limits it seemed, for only a day or so after I cleaned it, pop-ups and weird stuff would show up again. She was getting sick of it. I was getting sick of cleaning it, so I suggested, offhand, installing a different operating system that is a bit more impervious to those nasties. To my surprise, she agreed.
Apple has just released a new web page with
developer information concerning Mac OS 10.5, Leopard. Among other things, the list includes: OpenGL 2.1, resolution independence, the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control framework from TrustedBSD, Code signing, and much more. And yes, boys and girls, there are screenshots as well.
Update: Apple also
launched faster MacBook Pros today.
Update II: Screenshots of Leopard from ThinkSecret.
Submitted by Joel Dahl
2006-10-24
PC-BSD
"iXsystems is a leading provider of high-performance computing clusters, blade servers, rackmount servers, and storage solutions based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux. iXsystems also recently
announced its acquisition of the PC-BSD operating system. I had the opportunity to interview Kris Moore, founder and lead developer of the PC-BSD project, and Matt Olander, CTO of iXsystems,
about the acquisition."
"Yes, as a complete suprise it seems that Microsoft has
released the final version of their long-time-in-the-making Anti-Spyware program, Windows Defender. The build is marked as 1.1.1592.0 and it seems it can be installed over previous versions (beta 2 that is; it cannot be installed over beta 1, previously known as Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta)."
A benchmarking comparison of Solaris 10 and Windows XP (64bit) running on a Sun Ultra 20 M2 Dual Core Opteron 1210 workstation.
"Overall, I'm pleased with the performance of the Sun Ultra 20 M2. While this model (with an Opteron 1210) isn't quite as fast as a low-end Mac Pro, it's less than half the price of a low-end Mac Pro. Models equipped with faster Opterons (like the Opteron 1218) will certainly be more competitive when it comes to performance."
Five years later and Apple now holds over 75% of the mp3 player market. Read why the iPod
succeeded, why Gizmodo
hates it and the
generation tree at Engadget. Fatefully, today I happened to
post a review of the 1st Gen Nano too.
The Mozilla Foundation has released version 2.0 of their Firefox webbrowser
to their ftp site. The
release notes are not yet updated, so you'll have to do with the release notes for the third release candidate, which will probably not differ all that much from the final notes.
In
the latest episode of LugRadio, Eric S. Raymond suggests that the Linux community need to start integrating more proprietary software in order to get market share. ESR points to proprietary multimedia codecs as an example of somewhere where Linux distributions should step away from free-software rhetoric in order to get more users, with the aim of bringing those users back to open source later on and to gain more influence with manufacturers and music/movie/media distributors to make Linux a properly supported platform.
Submitted by anonymous
2006-10-23
3D
A new nVIDIA display driver
has been released which fixes the
exploit reported last week. The driver was vulnerable to a buffer overflow that allowed an attacker to run arbitrary code as root. This bug could be exploited both locally as well as remotely (via a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).
"The security industry and trade press have directed a lot of attention toward the 'Zero-day attack', promoting it as THE threat to guard against. According to the marketing hype, the Zero-Day attack is the one that you should most fear, so you must put in place measures to defend your organization from it. The Zero-Day threat is born the moment a vulnerability is publicly announced or acknowledged. But what about the period of time that the threat existed before being announced. At StillSecure we call this class 'Less-Than-Zero' threat. In this two-part series
I'll examine this Less-Than-Zero threat, compare it to the Zero-Day threat, and discuss ways to protect yourself from Less-Than-Zero attacks and vulnerabilities for which patches, signatures, etc., do not yet exist."
Among the few things I'm proud of in my life, not having had contact with Windows when I first "met" a computer is somewhere around the top. Indeed, the first computer I used ran Unix, and I have been using Unices myself for some time.
Submitted by Anonymous Reader
2006-10-23
Benchmarks
"A lot of people has been asking me about some performance comparison for the vector graphics framework we have. Rendering polygons, especially when we're dealing with stroke, tends to be the most expensive rendering operation performed in vector graphics. I constructed a little test, which
tests raw polygon rendering power of Qt and Cairo. For the test I used the latest Qt main branch, and the master branch from Cairo's Git repository."
This is a review of Slackware 11.0 where the author explains what is in store for the Linux users who choose to use this Linux distribution. The article writes: "
When you hear the name Slackware, you are at once transported to a world where Linux users feel more at home in setting the configurations by editing ordinary text files. In fact the credo of Slackware is to keep it as simple as possible. In popular speak, it is known by the acronym KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)."
"The talk lately has centred about Vista's security APIs, but Linux certainly needs improvements in this area, because AV vendors still rely on an external kernel module to implement 'real time' file scanning." The Inq also reviews AVG antivirus for Linux, and concludes
it is a must-have
Fedora Core 6 has been released to mirrors, as Linux-Noob has
found out. They also have a
screenshot tour. Highlights of this release include support for Compiz/AIGLX, GNOME 2.16, KDE 3.5.4, a new theme, performance improvements, and much more, as can be found in the
release notes.
Update: More screenshots.
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