Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One year ago, Google Chrome came out of nowhere to re-ignite the browser debate. Today, it's reached (development) version 4.0, and it's anchoring a much-anticipated operating system. Here's a look back at where Chrome's been in 12 short months.

Montavista now supports x86, ARM 5 and 6 and MIPS as market-specific embedded Linux. Released in May, version 6 of the embedded Linux operating system now has Versatile ARM 1176 and 926 (ARM versions 5 and 6), the Freescale MPCs 8377, 8349 and 8572, Intel x86 platforms with Pentium and Xeon processors, a number of MIPS and the developer board Xilinx ML 507 on its list of platform-specific distros.

wo months after the release of the beta version, Red Hat has released the fourth major update to its Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 is, for the first time, built around KVM which uses Intel VT-d virtualisation capabilities. This will provide the foundation for the, currently in beta, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV) platform. Thanks to RHEL 5.4's built in support for the PCI-SIG standardised SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualisation), PCI resources can be allocated to individual virtual instances when using a Intel Xeon 5500 based platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 was just released, but Red Hat engineers have already been working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and today a few details regarding this next major feature release were learned during the Red Hat Summit in Chicago. Details regarding RHEL 6.0 are scant, especially with Red Hat being a public company and all, but some new information was gained today and some signals of what's coming down the pipe can already be spotted in Fedora.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is hosting its annual summit in Chicago this week, and the star of the event was today's launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which sports the first commercially supported KVM hypervisor from the company. In this case, KVM is tucked up inside of RHEL 5.4, right alongside the integrated Xen hypervisor that customers have been able to deploy since RHEL 5.0 was launched in March 2007. When Red Hat caught the virtualization bug several years back, Xen was the horse to back, and Red Hat did, just like Novell, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and others did. But KVM is, according to Red Hat, a leaner and meaner hypervisor and is integrated into the Linux kernel already, so it has some benefits compared to Xen.

Traditionally, storage devices have managed the blocks of data given to them without being concerned about how the system used those blocks. Increasingly, though, there is value in making more information available to storage devices; in particular, there can be advantages to telling the device when specific blocks no longer contain data of interest to the host system. The "discard" concept was added to the kernel one year ago to communicate this information to storage devices. One year later, it seems that the original discard idea will not survive contact with real hardware - especially solid-state storage devices.

When I got started with Linux, The one thing I couldn’t find was good download managers. but today we have plenty of them, in fact what we have on Linux is simply better than Adware/Shareware download managers on Windows. Downloading in Linux is not limited to using Wget, KDE KGet or Gwget or cURL now..

An operating systems most basic function is to act as a layer between the computer hardware and the user space programs. User space meaning the programs you use as a computer user, ie. office, email, internet and games programs. What an operating system provides to those user space programs is a standard interface to the computers hardware, no matter what type of hardware that is.

After two years deep into Linux, the Australian Con Kolivas has emerged with a new scheduler that above all should provide significantly better performance on dual and quad processors.

Red Hat have announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy, the companies solution for on site systems management. The announcement was made at the Red Hat Summit currently taking place in Chicago. RHN Satellite 5.3 is the first version of Red Hat's system management platform to be based on the Spacewalk project, an open source (GPLv2) management platform for Linux systems which supports the updating of Red Hat and Red Hat derived distributions such as Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux.

It has long been predicted that WPA (wireless encryption) would go the way of WEP and become ineffective. Japanese researchers demonstrate that WPA can be broken as quickly as WEP---in less than a minute.

Matt Hall at the game developers Larva Labs has complained in a blog entry of low sales in Google's Android application store. In August, the company generated an average revenue of $62.39 per day with two games. Hall says this makes it "Very difficult to buy the summer home at this rate." Hall also refers to the game Trism, which on the iPhone took around a quarter of a million dollars in it's first two months on the iPhone App Store. The same game on the Android store has, over the same length of time, sold five hundred copies; an equivalent income of $1,046 at most.

The Linux Foundation will be calling its first LinuxCon conference from September 21 through 23 in Portland OR. Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth will be among the speakers and Linux Magazine Online will do a live stream, free for the keynotes.

Recently I've received some mail asking for a brief explanation on how to build Linux audio applications from source code packages. Ask and ye shall receive, hence the following simple guide for the perplexed, the puzzled, and the downright mystified. Compiling software is hardly rocket science, and if an old guitar-picker like myself can do it certainly you can too.

In a recent report on TechCrunch, it was noted that modifications were being made to the Chrome browser which hint that the forthcoming ChromeOS will use the browser as the application launcher. Details also reveal that the developers at Google are extending the status bar to include an application launching control, a clock and battery indicator.

"A very complex technology to make network management simple." That's what the developers of the eBox platform promise small and medium sized organizations, and it's certainly an attractive idea.

Sony has announced that its U.S. line of Vaio computers have Google's Chrome installed as their default browser. Meanwhile, the Mac version of Chrome inches closer to being ready for public consumption with the release of a Snow Leopard-compatible update.

Parallels Inc. today released a new version of its Windows/Linux desktop virtualization software, saying it should be able to run some applications as much as eight times faster than its prior version. Parallels is perhaps best known for its Parallels Desktop for Mac application, which lets users run Windows software on Mac computers, but it has several other similar products. One is Parallels Workstation 2.2, which let users create Windows or Linux virtual machines and run them as "guests" on top of Windows, Linux or Mac OS X computers.

Yesterday, we brought you the first of two pieces covering a recent post by Esther Schindler summarizing What Open Source Projects Need to Know About Interacting with the Press, the presentation she co-lead with openSUSE Community Manager Joe Brockmeier, O'Reilly's James Turner, and Page One PR's Jennifer Cloer, who oversees public relations for the Linux Foundation. Today we conclude with Schindler's final point, and our own suggestions.

On July 16, Brad Spengler disclosed an easily-exploitable kernel vulnerability based on getting the kernel to dereference a null pointer. This security hole affected a version of the kernel which had not been widely distributed, so it was a problem for relatively few users, but it highlighted a class of problems which was sure to be seen again. Given that, and given our community's perception of itself as being responsive to security problems, it should be safe to assume that steps were taken to prevent null pointer vulnerabilities from opening up systems in the future. The reality is that some things have truly improved, but that some important vulnerabilities remain.