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I was resolved not to write another Unixfication story until I had more concrete news of Sun and Linus actually working together, and filed it away under “Maybe”. Like many of the speculative peices I write, it was a thought exercise with the objective of “shaking the tree” so to speak.

With Fedora 9, the Fedora project continues its tradition of being the most innovative major distribution, combining new applications from other distributions as well as its own inventions. However, in no other release has Fedora walked the line between leading edge and bleeding edge so precariously. At times, as with its updating of subsystems and its selection of desktop software, Fedora 9 manages to innovate without inconveniencing users. But, in other cases, most notably in the changes to package installation, the project has chosen innovation over usability.

Draw is probably the most under-estimated of the OpenOffice.org applications. Either users seem to expect it to be equivalent to the GIMP or Visio, or they fail to see its desktop publishing possibilities -- but in all cases they are disappointed. Probably, that explains why the OpenOffice.org Extensions page has only a handful of Draw extensions. It may also explain why some of the few that are available are limited in functionality and awkward to use, and almost all seem to still be in heavy development.

Mozilla has pushed out the initial release candidate of Firefox 3 for download. The new Firefox code of the firm’s increasingly popular web browser is available in 45 languages as a public preview for developers, as well as anyone else who fancies tinkering around with Internet Explorer’s closest rival. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for nearly three years.

Openbravo, maker of open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) and POS (point of sale) platforms, has secured $12 million in new funding. The VAR Guy traded email with Manel Sarasa, CEO of Openbravo, for his thoughts on the funding. Here’s a look at the email exchange.

"This time around, we have 60+% of the changes in drivers, notably drives/video and drivers/media, with some infiniband, networking and usb lovin' to fill things out," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc3 kernel. "The rest is (as usual) mostly arch updates," he continued, "this time mostly mips, m68k and uml." Linus noticed that Linux kernel development has been managed with git now as long as it was managed with BitKeeper, a little over three years for both tools. He explained, "the most striking difference has nothing to do with git or BK (the switch-over timing was just the reason I decided to take a look), but with the fact that we're not just continuing to develop, but we're developing faster and with more people,"

LXer Feature: 19-May-2008

This article focuses upon testing the reliability user input at the lowest level. The first line of defense is use of automated searches that might detect malicious inputs. Personally I wish there were a better option. Being realistic, we are confronting coders with superior skills that have added advantage of surprise, stealth and economic incentives. Whereas we are reactive to new or suspected threats as they arise or worse discovered later.

If you have more than one Debian or Ubuntu Linux machines in your home or office, you know that when you upgrade them you have to download the same file twice, resulting in a waste of bandwidth, and more important TIME!. Well that should not be that way, you may use apt-cacher which is a .deb package proxy that will take care of the versions of the downloaded files, and keep the latest in the disk for your upgrades.

msort is a tool for sorting text files. With both a command-line and graphical interface, it allows you to pick out where your sort keys are in a file and lets you select how to order those keys in a number of ways. Compared with the GNU sort program that is installed on most Linux systems, msort offers more flexibility in defining where your sort keys are and how to order them, as well as great internationalization support with full support for UTF-8, the ability to sort a file using different locales for different sort keys, and support for numbers in non-Western number systems.

Free software users rarely, if ever, need to be concerned about the license that governs the applications they use. Unlike developers or distributors, users are unlikely to pay attention to whether a program is released under a BSD, GPL, or some other license—not so with proprietary software. If Blizzard Entertainment has its way, it could get a whole lot worse, with proprietary vendors controlling the behavior of its users and enforcing it by way of the Copyright Act.

Ubuntu, the popular Linux distro that seems to be on the doorsteps of mainstream acceptance, gets better and better with each release. Their latest release 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is certainly no exception and in fact is their most polished release to date. Hardy Heron is the second ever “LTS” (long term support) release from Ubuntu which entails 3 years of support for desktop versions and 5 years of support for server versions. With that in mind, it seems the developers from Ubuntu concentrated squarely on stability for Hardy Heron.

The recently appointed head of Microsoft's global Linux and open source team hopes the company will have a clear and comprehensible open source strategy by 2015. Sam Ramji wants people to clearly understand what projects the company is contributing to, and what code Microsoft is making available - along with the terms - on a routine basis. It seems Ramji is talking about people both inside and outside Microsoft knowing what’s going on. "We don't have hard rules... right now, it's still careful judgment case by case. By 2015, I think it would be set up a," he told Reg Dev, just before his promotion.

Since the introduction of AMD's new Linux OpenGL driver and their open-source strategy running in parallel, the past few months have been especially exciting for ATI Linux users and the Linux graphics scene in general. To many Linux users, ATI graphics have went from being a name synonymous with problems and poor 3D performance to being an open-source crown jewel that has set a precedence in the industry by releasing their GPU register documentation, but at the same time continuing to develop their high-performance proprietary driver for users interested in the best performance and enabling all of the bells and whistles on their graphics card.

Wikis are a great way to collaborate on text documents, but different wikis sometimes use incompatible wiki markup languages, and few wikis provide simple WYSIWYG editors to shorten the learning curve. Even for those fluent in wiki markup, using a word processor to create wiki content is often more convenient -- especially for publishing existing documents and for creating complex tables. Now the newly available Sun Wiki Publisher simplifies the process of publishing an OpenOffice.org Writer document directly to a compatible MediaWiki wiki from OpenOffice.org 2.4 or later without the need for a Web browser.

Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Fedora 9 came out last week as expected, but the many experimental features and software packages in the distribution seem to detract some would-be users from upgrading their distribution. Do you enjoy testing the latest and greatest the Linux development world has to offer? Then Fedora 9 is for you. Otherwise look elsewhere. In the news section, Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth calls on greater release synchronisation between the major Linux vendors, Debian struggles to come to terms with a massive OpenSSL vulnerability, ComputerWold Australia interviews Ian Murdock, the Sun Microsystems' vice president in charge of OpenSolaris, and Gentoo succeeds in reinstating Gentoo Foundation in New Mexico. Also in this issue, an explanation why DistroWatch does not focus more on GPL violations and other legal topics, and an opinion piece on the subject of growing mistrust of users towards Canonical and Ubuntu. Happy reading!

I set up a lot of PCs and while I have a fast 10Mbs Internet connection I wanted to utilize my faster internal network bandwidth better. With a new distro release it's less important as most of what I need is on the CD but as updates are released I end up downloading increasing amounts of data for each install. I've been doing lazy tricks like copying /var/cache/apt/archives to a network-shared directory but it's sloppy and multiple versions of packages accumulate. Setting up local repository was the answer for me.

Microsoft is talking to Yahoo! about an alternative transaction that doesn't involve an acquisition, the world's largest software maker said Sunday. Yahoo said it is open to "pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders." The announcement comes two weeks after Microsoft abruptly stopped its pursuit of Yahoo, withdrawing a sweetened $46 billion offer and saying it would not make a hostile bid for the Internet company.

wine-1.0rc1 was released on Friday, May 9th, 2008. Wine is now in a code freeze in preparation for the 1.0 release. According to http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan, wine-1.0.0-rc2 will be due out Friday, May 23rd, 2008. It will be something like be the next to last release candidate for 1.0. Alexandre is on vacation, so git is a bit stale. In particular, Photoshop CS2 and DNS 9 don't install properly due to a regression introduced just before his vacation started; here's the fix. Some effort has been put into making it easy for people to automatically report "make test" failures; see MakeTestFailures for info and results.

How quickly the mighty retrograde their product line. And in the end, it is pretty funny. It wasn't a multi-billion dollar coalition of global competitors that banded together to make Microsoft retreat. It was a ragged band of developers, users and Advocates who spend as much time ripping into each other as they do fighting off Microsoft. It was an entity that doesn't even have a physical address or even a real leadership presence that forced Microsoft to all but abandon their billion dollar Vista venture and re-issue XP. How it is being done is even more amusing.

With LiMo’s recent announcement that Verizon had hopped onto their Board of Directors, things are starting to heat up between the LiMo platform and Google’s competing product, Android. Both are open-source Linux-based platforms, and both are aiming to rock the handset market sometime in the next year or so.