Monthly Archive:: May 2007

Red Hat will use its annual summit to share its vision of a new paradigm for business PCs, which includes a partnership with Intel Corp. to deploy appliances in a virtual machine to bring enterprise-class management and security to the PC.

Review of the new Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition. We downloaded and installed three different versions of Mandriva 2007.1 and there was one version that come out head and shoulders above the rest.

"k3b is one of the most important applications for many Linux users. The immensely popular and fully-featured CD/DVD writing application has been a mainstay of the standard Linux desktop since its early releases. Since last year, Sebastian Trüg, the initial author and present lead developer of k3b, has been employed by Mandriva both to work on k3b and to work on the Nepomuk desktop project. We asked Sebastian a few questions about k3b, Mandriva and Nepomuk."

Red Hat announced a new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop, at its annual Red Hat Summit tradeshow in San Diego. This move is designed, in part, to compete with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop, which has achieved success in business desktop markets, and with Ubuntu 7.04, which will soon appear on Dell PCs. Some reporting about this can also be found at the company's magazine. Update: Elsewhere, talking security with Red Hat's Mark Cox.

Gorm 1.2.1 has been released. "Gorm (Graphical Object Relationship Modeller) is meant to be the counter part to NeXT's Interface Builder. With Gorm designing tough and complex graphical interfaces for your applications can easy and quickly be done using drag & drop, powerful inspectors and teamwork with ProjectCenter."

In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of the trappings of Linux. The project is one of the items on the to-do list of Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian version of Linux and, as of March, Sun's chief operating systems officer. Though he wouldn't confirm the name of the project, Murdock - who's from Indiana - discussed the project's essence at the JavaOne conference here Monday, and Sun spokesman Russ Castronovo confirmed the name.

Microsoft has released patches for 19 vulnerabilities, 14 of which are critical, hitting at holes in Excel, Word, Office, Exchange, Internet Explorer, cryptographic technology and the whopper of them all, the zero-day vulnerability in the DNS Server's use of RPC. The DNS remote code execution vulnerability affects server-grade operating systems, including Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, and only those that have the DNS service enabled, such as Domain Controller, DNS Server or Microsoft Small Business Server configurations.

Sun Microsystems has announced the release of an open-source version of its Java Development Kit for Java Platform Standard Edition. Sun has contributed the software to the OpenJDK Community as free software under the GNU GPLv2. Sun also announced that OpenJDK-based implementations can use the JCK (Java SE 6 Technical Compatibility Kit) to establish compatibility with the Java SE 6 specification. OpenBSD has already started importing the release.

Ubuntu 7.04 - also known as Feisty Fawn - shines for its excellent software management tools and large catalog of ready-to-install free software applications. Read more at eWeek.

Max Spevack, Fedora Project leader posted a outline and expected impact of the Fedora 7 release: "One of the Fedora Project's success metrics is building and running itself in a way such that no single entity can completely control Fedora's fate. Fedora 7 gets us there, insofar as there is no "secret sauce" in the ability to spin a Fedora distribution. Nothing is hidden."

Mayank Sharma from Linux.com tries Mandriva 2007 Spring on several machines. He finds the distro to be very stable, sporting a good package selection, just the documentation a bit sparse.

Months go, I reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: "All in all, I am impressed by Windows Vista . Windows Vista is better than XP, and definitely more than just an improved look as many say." After 5 months of usage, it is time to put that statement into perspective.

Xandros today launched Xandros Server Standard Edition 2, a complete, enterprise-grade SMB Linux server package including Xen virtualization and more than 30 other services. The new Xandros Linux server is compatible with existing Windows domain and networking topologies.

"In this chapter from the ExtremeTech book 'Hacking Ubuntu: Serious Hacks Mods and Customizations' you'll learn how to set up the operating system to your taste with things like changing the startup music, the background, fonts, icons, and colors, and navigating the Nautilus file manager - on both PCs and Macs." The book was written for an older version of Ubuntu but it still largely applies for Feisty Fawn too.