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Despite what you’ve heard, the online version of Office 2010 announced by Microsoft earlier this week won’t be free to corporate users, and isn’t a threat to the likes of Google, Adobe, or even Zoho, which sells online productivity software to small and medium-sized businesses. It’s true that Microsoft will offer consumers a free “lightweight” version of Office 2010 through their Windows Live (formerly Hotmail) accounts. But that largess doesn’t extend to business customers, who will either have to pay a subscription fee or purchase corporate access licenses (CALs) for Office in order to be given access to the online application suite. Microsoft already does this with email – the infamous Outlook Web Access (or OWA, pronounced ow!-wah! because of the painful user experience). But wait – there’s more! A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs or $41,000, all CALs included if they want to share documents using the online version of Office 2010.

Regardless bug with failure checksum offloading was fixed in SNV_81 , i.e. a while ago. OpenSolaris 2009.06 PV DomU install at Xen 3.4.1 Linux Dom0 appears still to be affected. Wrong checksum may be easily captured via tcpdump on the LAN due to DHCPDISCOVER request issued by OSOL installer is a broadcast request. Following bellow procedure involves Solaris Kernel module debugger to patch OSOL’s (SNV_111b) kernel at booting up to succeed with dhcp lease and to be able proceed with initial install. File /etc/system gets updated via root terminal session before standard reboot to make the patch for kernel permanent. Posting is devoted first of all to Linux users , who are not aware of “kmdb” syntax and involving into boot process.

The news has been abuzz about Google's upcoming OS. Many people have been arguing reasons for and against the system, its viability in such a market, and, if the OS is successful, even the morality of the company who may be trusted with even more private information than it already has. Well, here's another reason for Chrome OS: it could bring more jobs in the area of Linux IT.

After being in development for a number of months and being challenged by a few delays, Mesa 7.5 was officially released last night. What's most significant about this milestone is that it's the first release to include the Gallium3D architecture. The Gallium3D drivers are still incomplete and there are many state trackers to be added, but this code for the next-generation Linux graphics card drivers is now living in mainline Mesa.

Use of a new algorithm will allow Google to provide smaller, faster updates for its Chrome browser, and thereby significantly reduce server and network workload. For security updates in particular this results in a narrower window of vulnerability. In a blog post Stephen Adams describes the "Courgette" technique. Until now Google has used the bsdiff algorithm to identify differences in the binary versions of the browser. "We are big fans of bsdiff - it is small and works better than anything else we have tried."

Jolicloud is an Ubuntu-based netbook OS designed to be easy to use and work well on the small screens of netbooks.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components. I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

This distro was brought to my attention in the BN IRC room, and whilst my distro hopping machine had difficulties with it (its a little anti social at the moment) I gave it a run on one of the many machines dotted around my house and found myself very surprised (pleasantly) by the results. Its a Slackware based distro, and in these days of MONO uncertainty and the ever growing popularity of about 4 or 5 of the “big name” distro’s, its nice to break out of the mold and take a look at a lesser known option (sans MONO I hasten to add).

Please stay away from GNU/Linux. Don't say I haven't warned you!

Quod Libet is a GTK music player written in Python with support for various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, MP4 and WMA. Quod Libet has a different interface and a slightly different approach compared to players like Rhythmbox or Banshee, for example.

Vector Linux is a popular Linux Distro whose motto is “speed, performance, stability”. Version 6.0 was released in February 2009. Their stated goal is to “Keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide.” Having said that, this end user decided to see what was cooking at Vector.

Microsoft and Yahoo! are reportedly talking again, this time about an ad deal. It's about time the two companies realize they are a much more formidable check against Google search dominance together than they would ever hope to be apart.

Windows and Apple rely on endless upgrade cycles to keep the money flowing. Linux, on the other hand, is much more considerate of the planet and our finances. Eric Geier has five excellent ideas for giving new life to old PCs with Linux.

This morning VIA's Bruce Chang had submitted the DRM code for the Chrome 9 IGP with a request that it be pushed into the mainline Linux kernel. The DRM alone isn't usable to an end-user without a Mesa driver or something else to take advantage of this kernel component. VIA previously expressed interest in a Gallium3D-based Chrome 9 driver, but now today we find out they have no intentions on creating an open-source Chrome 9 3D driver. Instead, they just want this DRM into the mainline Linux kernel so that it can be used by their binary blob and to hopefully have some open-source developers come along and create a free software driver from their incomplete documentation.

Construct an on-demand software build service using ooRexx that uses the Linux® Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for better performance. KVM acts as the host for the guest operating systems that build the target software for the user. The Apache Web server controls the builds and stores the results for later retrieval by the user. Learn how to set up the build server and create guests, customize build requests, and organize and access build results.

They say that beauty is only skin deep — if that is true, then Linux has a good shot at Miss World, as its available skins are many and varied indeed. As the impending release of Ubuntu 9.10 — colorfully named the Karmic Koala — draws near, it's time to begin thinking about its skin, and that's exactly what the Ubuntu Artwork Team is up to.

Brad Spengler, the developer behind the Grsecurity project, has published an exploit for a vulnerability in the Tun interface in Linux kernel 2.6.30 and 2.6.18, used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5), which can be exploited by attackers to obtain root privileges. Of particular interest is the fact that the exploit is even able to circumvent security extensions such as SELinux. According to Spengler's report, the vulnerability is only found in these two versions of the kernel. The core of the problem is a normally non-exploitable null pointer dereference, which becomes exploitable due to the GCC's optimisation function.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

When Microsoft offered more details about Office 2010 earlier this week, The VAR Guy noticed a rather interesting nugget of information involving Microsoft Office for the Web’s anticipated browser support and software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The software giant, it seems, will be giving equal time to Firefox (the open source web browser) and Apple’s Safari. Here’s the scoop.

The Gargoyle project is working on an alternative web interface for better router configuration. The project has now reached its first stable version 1.0.