Monthly Archive:: September 2007

Apple on Friday evening seeded developers with yet another pre-release of its next-generation Leopard operating system, this time a full-blown build that appears as if it could be a candidate for release. Labeled "Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A559," the new release came just hours after the Cupertino-based company issued two minor updates to the previous full-sized build (9A527), both of which were aimed at testing the system's automated Software Update mechanism.

The Software Freedom Law Center has filed the first US infringement case to defend the General Public License version 2. The case has been brought against Monsoon Multimedia, a specialist in video viewing and capturing devices, which has offices in Silicon Valley and in New Delhi. SFLC legal director Dan Ravicher told The Register: "This case could have far-reaching implications because it's the first case in the US to enforce copyright in GPL."

Microsoft on Sept. 21 denied claims by hard drive industry executives and analysts that the world's largest software company isn't providing optimized drivers for the new hybrid drives about to come into the market. "Microsoft certainly does provide drivers for hybrid hard drives in Vista," Matt Ayers, program manager in the Windows Client Performance group for Microsoft told eWEEK. "They've been in there all along, and they work with any hard drive. I don't quite understand the issue here. And about 'optimized' drivers - we never send out any drivers that aren't optimized," Ayers said. In addition, Microsoft has started a 'downgrade-to-XP' program for its OEM partners.

Ian Murdock took the stage in one of the small rooms at the Moscone Center West to talk about the OpenSolaris Binary Distribution that is currently known as Project Indiana. We captured all of the slides Ian had shown, and while most of the information he shared was just reiterated from his past talks, there was some interesting details worth sharing. Among the advantages of Project Indiana is that it will use Sun's ZFS as the default file-system, and Project Indiana will be taking full advantage of its abilities to create snapshots and perform rollbacks if something with the system's software goes wrong. With Sun's past work with the GNOME project, GNOME will be the desktop environment in Project Indiana said Ian Murdock.

The Microsoft Permissive License, one of two licenses the software maker submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval as open-source licenses in August, is unlikely to be approved in its current form. There have been two principle objections to the license from the open-source community, Michael Tiemann, the president of OSI, told eWEEK in an interview here at the annual Gartner Open Source Summit on Sept. 20. The first objection is that the use of the word 'permissive' in the license title implies an expectation that the license does not meet. The second complaint is that the MS-PL is incompatible with a large number of other open-source licenses, he said.

The second KDE e.V. quarterly report is available, covering topics like KDE's involvement in the Google Summer of Code, the SQO-OSS project (Open Source Software Quality Observatory), akonadi, ODF, and Oxygen meetings, as well as reports from marketing, HIG, and sysadmin teams.

I upgraded my laptop to the latest Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon a few days ago only to be greeted with an additional feel of polish and goodness. Read more for our mini preview.

Mandriva Linux 2008 RC2 'Kepler' was released today. New features since the release of RC1 include the final release of GNOME 2.20, the inclusion of the new 8.41.7 version of ATI's proprietary driver in the non-free repository to support Radeon HD cards, significant kernel updates that improve support for certain ATA controllers and many audio chipsets, some new features in the urpmi and rpmdrake package management tools, and over 500 bug fixes since RC2. Download information and more is available on the full release information page here, the overall Mandriva Linux 2008 release notes are here, and a guide to the new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 is here.

"OpenSUSE has been driving innovation on the Linux desktop, and in today's serial we'll be discovering just what has been happening on the GNOME front. Among other things, openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain, and be among the very first to have, the new GNOME 2.20. We'll see what new things you can expect from this version, what additional polish openSUSE brings to the desktop, and finally we'll be talking to JP Rosevear, an openSUSE and GNOME developer, to find out a little more."

In a statement published this week, SCO Group blames the success of Linux and 'negative publicity', as causes for its decline - the company may need to wind up its operations after its copyright case against Novell collapsed, prompting it to file for bankruptcy. My take: In Dutch, we have a saying: hij die kaatst, kan de bal verwachten.

Columnist Bill Thompson at the BBC asks whether the time has come for Apple to be put under the EU microscope in the same way as Microsoft has. "If Apple was serious about building a music industry around downloads and digital devices then it would open up its devices and interfaces to allow greater innovation and greater competition."

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program - evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered - and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

Apple recently seeded developers with yet another build of Mac OS X 10.4.11, destined to be the final update to Tiger. Builds 8S155 (PowerPC) and 8S2155 (Intel) deliver an additional number of bug fixes, including remedies to issues with the BSD Kernel and interlock timeouts, ASR and scanning and restoring, CoreText Layout, and a bug with ImageCapture that creates problems downloading images from an iPhone when the phone has a large number of saved photos.

The openSUSE development team has announced that openSUSE 10.3 Release Candidate 1 is available for testing. "After quite a few rebuilds and testing, the openSUSE team is happy to announce that RC1 looks brilliant and is now available for download. We consider this release to be feature complete, stable, and suitable for testing from any user. For more information on the release schedule, take a look at the Roadmap."