Monthly Archive:: June 2007

"Buried deep in a pile of slashdot comments, Matthew Dillon of DragonFly gives a detailed assessment of the Intel Core bugs. While a lot of news sites and bloggers were quick to dismiss the issue as inflated, Dillon's comments provide a much closer look at the actual issues."

"The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA's NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems."

The iPhone is out and about, and everyone waiting in line for hours/days got one (including Woz, and the mayor of Philadelphia who apparently had nothing better to do). Unboxing pictures here, dissecting pictures here, PDF manual, and one of the best-designed iPhone web apps can be found here: the iPhoneAppsManager (requires a Safari/Webkit browser to work). Update: Reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Update 2: It is claimed Apple UK will announce a 3G iPhone on Monday, as well as deals with Vodafone and T-Mobile. Update 3: Lots of screenshots reveal no "weekend/weekday" recurrence in the alarm app.

The FSF today released version 3 of the GNU GPL, the popular free software license. "Since we founded the free software movement, over 23 years ago, the free software community has developed thousands of useful programs that respect the user's freedom. The programs are in the GNU/Linux operating system, as well as personal computers, telephones, Internet servers, and more. Most of these programs use the GNU GPL to guarantee every user the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute the program," said Richard Stallman, founder and president of the FSF. This article has some interesting replies from the BSD community (right in the middle).

Recently, Serenity Systems released the second first release candidate of eComStation 2.0, the successor to IBM's os/2. Mensys, the online distributor of eComStation and other os/2-related products, was so kind as to provide OSNews with a review copy of this release candidate, and since my experience with os/2 and eCS is not much more than a few failed attempts at installing Warp 4, I was eager to try it out. Read on for a short history of os/2 and eCS and a review of the release candidate.

On Full Disclosure, there's a negative analysis of Jeff Jones' six-month vulnerability report. "Conclusions that are drawn are built on a lack of understanding by the Microsoft researcher. I highly encourage him to go back and take another look, and pare down the results to essential information that is absolutely critical to the conclusions, rather than just 'Other OS's have more bugs, see, look at my graphs'."

"Red Hat and IBM recently announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has earned the highest level of security certification achievable by commercial off-the-shelf operating systems. The certification is applicable when RHEL5 is running on IBM hardware, but all of the software is freely available, which may reduce the worries of customers regardless of which hardware they are considering running Linux on. The Fedora and CentOS distributions will immediately benefit, because they use the same software and SELinux policies, but other distributions can use the information as well."

Today we feature a very interesting interview with David Turner, one of the main Freetype developers, discussing the project's past and future. These days, David continues his work in Freetype even after having been hired by Google.

The Ubuntu team has released Gutsy Tribe II. "The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features."

Kaj de Vos made two big announcements at SylCon 2007. The first was a new web browser, based on a port of WebKit. The second is Syllable Server, which will bring together the Syllable GUI with the Linux kernel to create a server operating system that compliments Syllable on the desktop. Syllable Server is not based on any existing Linux distribution and will look and feel as much like Syllable as possible.

"Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. The room is small, the concrete walls bare. A guard locks the steel door from the outside. There is no sound. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563."

Bryan Varner, one of the core developers of the stalled port of Java 1.4 port to BeOS R5 has an interesting post on his blog. Recently he met up with Ian Murdock of Sun at a local Java Users Group, and as a result he is now looking to restart the port, this time for Haiku.

Theo de Raadt wrote about the Intel Core 2 Duo chip: "Various developers are busy implementing workarounds for serious bugs in Intel's Core 2 cpu. These processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code." Intel has given a response to the concerns as well.

Google is launching this week a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop. Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline.