Only a few weeks after Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's biggest change ever - the release of the Unity-based Ubuntu 11.04 Linux - the company's CTO, Matt Zimmerman is leaving the company.
Like Britney Spears, Jeff Johnson did it again and decided to fork rpm once more. Following a week long outage of the main website, he announced on the Mandriva development mailing list the launch of rpm6.org, without giving much explanation. Without more information, some people speculate this was caused by an intrusive
merge by a Mandriva coder without discussing beforehand, while some others speak of the heavy criticism due to the migration, which still causing issues after several months.
"Qubes OS comes from an elegant concept: if you can isolate functional components within disposable containers, and you can separate those components that can be tainted through their interaction with the outside world from the core subsystems, you stand a good chance to preserve the integrity and security of the base Operating System at the possible expense of needing to jump through some hoops to move data around the system. All in all it sounds like a good proposition if it can be demonstrated to be practical." Read the full review.
Yeah, it's the day of double-dippin' today. And, the contradiction couldn't be bigger. In one corner we have one of the oldest and most respected distributions, and in the other corner we have the sometimes controversial but immensely popular relative newcomer. Slackware 13.37 and Ubuntu 11.04 have been released.
systemd, the new init system created by Lennart Poettering, has added a couple of interesting features. First, he has added support for chroot-style isolation capabilities, but instead of chroot he used the powerful per-process filesystem and PID namespaces supported by the Linux kernel. Second, he has added a new tool, systemd-analyze, which shows how much time took each service to start, so you can optimize your bootup time easily. It can even create simple bootchart-style graphs.
"The team led by security expert Joanna Rutkowska has released the first beta version of the Qubes OS Linux distribution. The operating system can also be installed on a USB stick thanks to its new installer. Qubes aims to provide security through virtualisation. It uses a Xen hypervisor to run applications in separate virtual machines based on Fedora 14. As a result, online banking data are not at risk when a game running in its own VM turns out to be a trojan."
Well, this is fascinating. ASUS hasn't even released its Eee Pad Transformer yet, but it's already put up for download the source code to the Linux kernel used in the Android Honeycomb operating system the machine runs. In other words, Google isn't withholding anything it is not allowed to withhold. As said by many - storm, teacup, meet. Go here, select download, select Android.
Linux 2.6.38 has been released. This release includes support for a automatic process grouping ("the patch that does wonders" ), significant scalability improvements in the VFS, Btrfs LZO compression and read-only snapshots, support for the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol (which helps to provide network connectivity in the presence of natural disasters, military conflicts or Internet censorship), transparent Huge Page support (without using hugetblfs), support for the AMD Fusion APUs, many drivers and other changes. You can read the full changelog as well.
"Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below..."
"A bug in the Caiaq USB driver, which could be used to execute arbitrary at the kernel level has been reported by Rafael Dominguez Vega of MRW InfoSecurity. The device drivers are vulnerable to buffer overflow condition when an USB device with an unusually long name (over 80 characters) is connected to the machine."
If you're an owner of a netbook or other hardware containing an Intel Poulsbo / GMA 500, the Linux 2.6.39 kernel should be rather exciting. Entering the Linux kernel's staging tree is an initial open-source driver for this notorious Intel graphics processor derived from Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX graphics core.
Splashtop OS, previously only available via OEM machines, today released its operating system to the general public. "Splashtop Inc, the worldwide leader in instant-access computing, today announced the immediate availability of Splashtop OS , a lightweight, web-centric operating system optimized for notebooks and netbooks. First introduced as a beta last November, Splashtop OS is a browser-based 'companion OS' that co-exists with the Windows operating system."
"A lot of modern Linux distributions created with desktop users in mind go out of their way to be user friendly. Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, Fedora - and many more. It is a sign of how desktop Linux has matured that even non-techy types can get a fully featured and easy-to-use open source operating system up and running in not much time at all. The creators of CrunchBang Linux, however, haven't quite gone in the same direction."
"PCLinuxOS is a great distro for individuals who favor rolling updates, performance, and a dedicated community. If you're a first-time Linux user or if you favor aesthetics over technological prowess, better choices are available."
A new open source project hopes to take Android and change it so it has a clean-room OpenJDK-based Java VM and will be based on what they refer to as a more standard Linux kernel. Meanwhile, rumor has it that RIM is considering using somebody's Java VM to run Android apps, but it won't be Dalvik.
"CRUX PPC 2.7 is now available. It works on Apple 32bit 'NewWorld' G3/G4 and Apple 64bit G5, Genesi PegasosII and Efika, Acube Sam440ep, YDL Powerstation, IBM Intellistation POWER and IBM Power Systems servers. CRUX PPC 2.7 is, as usual, released via two different installation ISO: 32bit and 64bit. The 32bit version is based on a single lib toolchain instead the 64bit one comes with a multilib toolchain. These two versions share the same ports tree."
I'm uncertain what Linux distro they were using before but today's release of version 0.9.8.1 is free to use on Intel Atom based systems. It would be nice if they distributed an image that doesn't require Windows to install but their target market appears to be Windows devices that include Slashtop OS as an alternate boot option in order to get online faster.
"Canonical has announced that it has released a database of certified components for Ubuntu and Linux , calling it the "world's most comprehensive, up-to-date component catalog". According to the Ubuntu sponsor, the online database is expected to reduce the time-to-market for Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) working on Ubuntu or other Linux systems."
Peppermint Ice is a Linux distribution whose main claim to fame is its use of a 'site-specific browser', dubbed Ice, which is based on Google's Chromium browser. This lightweight Linux distro is designed for netbooks and has a strong focus on Web applications.