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Great collection of usual, and unusual, Linux logos.

Earlier this week I discussed some of the challenges that OLPC faces with regard to the announcement of the XO-1.5. However I believe that Sugar Labs will also have to deal with some interesting challenges as result of this announcement. For Sugar Labs the XO-1.5 will mainly be yet another device that they'll want to support given that it's likely to be one of the best choices when it comes to low-cost portable hardware for developing countries. However given the pitiful state of Sugar 0.84 on the XO-1 hardware (check mavrothal's forum comments for more information) - which won't be improved until Fedora 12 is released in autumn - I remain skeptical of just how well Sugar will run on the XO-1.5.

It's that time again, ladies and gents & mdash; time for the biannual release of a new Ubuntu version. This time it's the Jaunty Jackalope, officially Ubuntu 9.04, rolling off the line, and bringing with it a fresh new set of features users have been longing for. Prime among the features being touted by the Ubuntu camp are improvements in speed, perhaps rather fitting for a release named for the jackalope. Boot speed is reportedly greatly improved, as low as twenty-five seconds in some cases. Hibernation and suspend/resume have been enhanced, including immediate availability post-hibernation. Those we spoke to noted an impressive improvement in boot speed, significant even for virtual machines, as well as dramatic speed improvements in finding and connecting to wireless networks.

The annual Linux kernel summit may gain the most attention, but the size of the kernel community makes it hard to get deeply into subsystem-specific topics at that event. So, increasingly, kernel developers gather for more focused events where some real work can be done. One of those gatherings is the Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop; the 2009 workshop began on April 6. Here is your editor's summary of the discussions which took place on the first day.

The Internet Systems Consortium has announced that it has received enough support from sponsors to launch the BIND 10 project, to create a replacement name server for BIND 9. BIND 9 began its development in 1998 and is the most widely used DNS server software on the Internet. Among the sponsors are the UK's Nominet and Germany's DENIC.

Linux ordinarily uses Cron to automatically perform routine system maintenance, such as rotating log files and updating spam filtering rules. This works well for servers and other systems that are powered on 24/7. If, however, you want to save power by shutting off the computer when it's not in use, as is common for desktop and laptop systems, Cron can't run. Not running Cron routinely can result in monstrously large log files and other problems. The Anacron utility provides a solution, enabling the computer to run regular maintenance jobs whenever the computer is powered on, even if those times are unpredictable.

The VAR Guy double-checked this rumor and got confirmation: Diskeeper may leap beyond Windows to offer disk defragmentation software on Linux and Mac OS X. What’s motivating the potential Diskeeper moves? Here’s the scoop.

Finally we have a stable, official release of GCC 4.4. This major update to the GNU Compiler Collection brings forth Graphite, which is a framework for providing loop optimizations and eventually will be used to provide automatic parallelization support...

The Ubuntu development team this afternoon announced the final release of Ubuntu 9.04, the latest version of its desktop operating system. This latest release of Ubuntu includes a number of new features including improved graphics, a better notification system and new cloud computing capabilities.

Ulteo is an interesting company co-founded by the founder of Mandrake Linux Gael Duval. When I spoke with Duval last year about the initial 1.0 release, he told me that the plan was to expand to Windows in 2009 -- and here it is.

In parts one and two we learned the basics of writing our own custom Gimp plugins, and learned that it's simple and very useful. Today we'll put it all together in a more complex plugin for creating fancy 3D text effects, to make text look more rounded and three-dimensional.

This leads me to Easy Peasy v1.1, which is based on Ubuntu 8.10. Installing the XFCE respin of Fedora was not uneventful. I had to search the Internet on how to configure the wireless adapter, sound and installing all of the multimedia codecs for video and Internet.

As I've mentioned in a previous Linux Line post, I am not a programmer. Yet Linux is built on the philosophical principle of freely sharing source code. This is how those who create Linux frequently advocate it. But if I'm not a programmer, and source code therefore means little to me, why do I use Linux? Why do I spend much of my time suggesting others use it? Is it just because it's available for free? (Spoiler: No.) These are interesting questions that are not discussed very often.

The verdict in the Pirate Bay trial surprised many people, seeing as how many errors the entertainment industry's lawyers had made, and how little understanding they seemed to have of how BitTorrent works. The height of the sentence also surprised many; for aiding in sharing just 33 copyrighted items, the four founders were sentenced to one year in jail, and a massive fine of 3.6 million USD. Well, as it turns out, we now know why we were all relatively surprised: the judge in the case, Thomas Norstrom, is member of the same pro-copyright groups as many of the people representing the entertainment industry in the case. Sveriges Radio's P3 news programme has found out that judge Thomas Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association. And who are also members of this group? Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, who all three represented the entertainment industry in the case against the Pirate Bay.

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav Bodner writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

A flaw in the open OAuth online authentication protocol has prompted major OAuth providers like Twitter and Yahoo to suspend their support of this protocol and stop offering this service for the time being. The security hole allows attackers to trick their way into obtaining user data. The OAuth protocol will need to be updated to fix the vulnerability.

Almost two million PCs globally, including machines inside UK and US government departments, have been taken over by malicious hackers.

Halfway there. And then half of that. Theoretically, only a quarter of the way there, but halfway done ;)

We are very excited to announce the release of the first public version (v1.0) of the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop. It comes after 2 years of development and months of beta tests by many organizations from our growing users community, and some of them are already using it in production. Now organizations can deliver to their PC users either Windows or Linux applications or a mix of the two on the same user desktop via the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop.

Note: The following post is a guest blog submitted to Microsoft Subnet by a security expert who wished to remain anonymous. Joanna Rutkowska recently released her new security whitepaper and exploit code entitled Attacking SMM Memory via Intel CPU Cache Poisoning. The thing that struck me about her research is just how easy this is to do. There is nothing super fancy or complex about the exploit code. Due to its simplicity, the odds are very high that this attack vector has been in use, even before this research published last month. Still, because this attack is so stealthy, we wouldn’t necessarily have been able to detect it.