Monthly Archive:: March 2009

"Novell today is rolling out the newest edition of its flagship enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11. The new releases are the first major updates since the SLES and SLED 10 releases in July of 2006. With SLES 11, Novell is also providing a baseline image so software vendors can easily build appliances. The concept is something know as a JeOS (Just enough Operating System) and has been trumpeted by Novell as the future of operating systems."

We always try to avoid politics like the plague here on OSNews, but sometimes, it's hard to avoid it. Take the case of Joel Tenenbaum, who could be liable for over 1 million USD if the Recording Industry Association of America gets its way. While many hoped for a change of pace when it comes to these matters, Barack Obama's Department of Justice has squarely sided with the RIAA.

Now that Battlestar Galactica is really, really over, and people are discussing whether or not the finale was super awesome or lame (the former, obviously), we can start to look for lessons we can learn from the series that redefined science fiction. "You think your business has it rough? The people of Battlestar Galactica have lived through a recession you wouldn't believe. With dwindling resources, a skeleton crew, enemies constantly lurking out of view, and a pervasive threat of annihilation, Admiral Adama navigates the vast unknown. Like any leader, he makes his share of mistakes - sometimes with devastating consequences. But regardless of the fate of that ragtag fleet, the tale of Galactica is rife with lessons that can benefit any business leader."

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.29. The new features include the inclusion of kernel graphics modesetting, WiMAX and AP wifi support, inclusion of squashfs and a preliminary version of btrfs, a more scalable version of RCU, ecryptfs filename encryption, ext4 no journal mode, support for filesystem freeze and other improvements. Here's a full list of changes.

We all know the stories of old computers or old operating systems still dutifully performing their tedious little tasks - the examples of electronic billboards running Windows 98, or ATMs running os/2 are abundant. A recent example that has been making its rounds across the internet is testament to the sturdiness of the Mac Classic IIs.

Apple has apologized for breaking Perl with its latest Mac OS X security update, saying it will distribute a solution to the problem with a future update. In a note to The Reg and a post to the Apple support forums, Senior Apple programmer Edward Moy apologized for "the unforeseen problems that the 2009-001 security update has caused" with Perl.

Peter Hutterer, Red Hat Xorg developer has posted the code for the first X Input 2 implementation. Peter is well known for his work on Multi Pointer X (MPX) and has more information on his blog. "XI2 is important for two reasons. One, it's the client-side API that enables applications to make use of MPX. For obvious reasons, I have some interest in getting this done. The other part of XI2 (and why it is called XI2) is that it's a new version of the X Input Extension. One of the goals here is a cleaned up API that is less painful to use than the first, current, version." Phoronix has other details as well.

TomTom has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network. The OIN was initially formed by Red Hat, IBM and others to protect Linux by being a clearing house for over 275 patents and patent applications. These are available, on a royalty free basis, to any member licensee. Members must agree not to use their own patent portfolio against Linux. Companies can also contribute their patents to the OIN to make them generally available. OIN is also one of the backers of Linux Defenders. It appears the recent Microsoft patent agitation against Tom Tom is the reason behind this move.

Git has increasingly become the standard distributed source code management tool for free and open source software projects with the likes of Xorg, Samba, WINE, Perl and Ruby on Rails using it already. GNOME has now joined the Git bandwagon. A survey among GNOME contributors showed Git to be by far the most popular choice. Developers Behdad Esfahbod, Kristian Høgsberg, Owen Taylor, and Federico MenaQuintero and a number of volunteers formed a team and have helped migrate all the GNOME projects to Git. They have published the details of the migration.

Engadget's recent piece, "Mobile OS shootout", provides a relatively thorough comparison of current smartphone platforms and what they have going for them, mostly from a consumer gadget hound's point of view. They provide a bunch of nice comparative tables, among them the table "Third Party Development". From this table we learn that each platform has its own SDK, whereby some of the apps available are considered "native" - a distinction most non-developers won't be able to grok, since it depends on an understanding of runtime environments, etc. It's hard to say exactly who this table is targeting, actually; the developer or the end-user that the rest of the article seems to target. Let's just investigate some of the assumptions it makes.

Recently, a new browser war has erupted all over the internet, with various browsers making massive improvements in each release to trumpet those made by others. While Firefox certainly ignited this new browser war, Chrome is the one who started the JavaScript war. The first release of Google's web browser came with a brand new JavaScript engine that was a lot faster than those of its competitors, forcing them to improve their JavaScript performance as well. This whole JS thing has gotten to the heads of the folks at Google, and they've created a site for experiments which show off the power of JS.

With the mobile operating system market heating up with the upcoming launch of Palm's webOS and version 3.0 of the iPhone's operating system, it pays to take a good look at how the various mobile platforms compare to one another. This is exactly what Engadget has done.

The Netfilter development team's Patrick McHardy has released an alpha version of nftables, a new firewall implementation for the Linux kernel, with a user space tool for controlling the firewall. nftables introduces a fundamental distinction between the user space defined rules and network objects in the kernel: the kernel component works with generic data such as IP addresses, ports and protocols and provides some generic operations for comparing the values of a packet with constants or for discarding a packet.

Recently we've had a couple of articles and discussions on OSNews about browser statistics. Every now and then someone in the comments will ask what OSNews statitstics are like, and what browsers and operating systems our readers are running. Well, recently we installed a fancy new web site analytics program, Mint. I figured I might as well put it to good use by showing some of the browser and platform statistics we've gathered over the past month.