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More of a King Cobra, really

Comment The next release of IBM's DB2 (for both z series and distributed systems), which is code-named Viperâ, will be generally available in the not too distant future: A mid-summer for distributed systems, according to IBM. It is therefore appropriate to consider some of the new features it will introduce, and its impact on the market.

The GP2X has been bandying around Europe for several months already, and finally it’s about to hit UK shores. Not before time either. Rather predictably for a new pretender to the handheld gaming throne, the GamePark GP2X will play games, movies and music, view photos and read eBooks. But its choice of operating system is relatively exotic.

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

"I have always been interested in Linux distributions and how they evolve, not just technically, but also in terms of their popularity and their -wanted or unwanted- position among the Linux users and on the broader market. In this regard, the Distrowatch web site is a fairly effective tool at tracking linux distributions no matter how small or short-lived they are. I think the site's online tool is actually the best one so far, and it has, in my opinion, produced the best stats concerning Linux distributions.."

If you don’t think the virus threat to your Mac is dire enough to spend any money protecting against it, ClamXav will get the job done. It’s based on a well-established open source project (clamav), and provides a decent level of protection (thanks in part to daily updates of its virus definitions). It costs nothing to buy or update (though the author does request donations), so ClamXav is about as cheap as it gets.

Leading open source systems and network management vendors Qlusters and Emu Software announced the industry’s first Open Management Consortium (OMC). The Consortium will promote the benefits offered by open source and open standard technologies and will provide a forum for product development collaboration among open source IT management projects.

Bon Echo Alpha 2, the second development milestone of Mozilla Firefox 2 aimed at developers and testers, is now available. Changes include inline spell checking in text boxes, automatic session restore after a crash and changes to the default tab behavior. The Bon Echo Alpha 2 Release Notes have more information.

Recently there has been a fuss over monolithic and micro kernels - specifically the direction of the Linux Kernel development. Free Software is about "freedom of choice", and we should be able to choose to compile the Linux Kernel as either a monolith or a microkernel. To help accelerate this process, could someone please steal Linus' laptop, install l4linux overnight on it and give it back to him?

In this second in a series of interviews with the major open source and proprietary implementations of ODF, I learn from OpenOffice.org's Louis Suarez-Potts and John McNeesh how OO compares to the competition, wherein lie its strengths, and where it will head in the future.

The number two digital certificate vendor, Comodo, expected their new, free, anti-virus engine's release to be greeted with accolades. Instead, they're drawing fire from critics who claim that the software sneakily installed more than they bargained for. Another case of Sony-style corporate deceit, or a few spoiled endusers looking a gift horse in the mouth? Email Battles ruminates.

Avangate sponsors ISDEF 2006

The OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) has promoted board-member Takashi Kunai to "director of Japan." Kunai led Unix and mainframe operating system development at Fujitsu for 30 years, and has been active in the Japan OSS Promotion Forum.

Sometimes you have to get it done and if you do not have complete access to a system then you must find a way. How to do a sandbox even in the simplest terms can be overlooked but if there is time - it can be done.

Software freedom vs. software utility is an ongoing battle, and I've ended up in the middle of it since I started producing training videos. I strongly prefer free software and GNU/Linux over the alternatives, and for the years when my main computer tasks (besides email and Web viewing) were writing, editing, and lightweight photo editing, I happily used nothing but Linux and free software. Now I use a proprietary operating system and proprietary software for some of my work. This galls me, but I feel I have no choice.

I get a lot of grief for using so called old window managers. I get a lot of grief for writing shell scripts as close to posix as I can (especially from lame sysadmins). I get a lot of grief for writing utils in anythng but bash. Well, for most of you - I do not think my personal answer to why I use C, Perl or sh-posix should be posted here. How about a look at minimalism from a pragmatic and practical point of view.

Coming right on out and gettin' with it, Redmond's "Bulldog" Ballmer laid it down for real to an audience of several hundred in Santa Clara, CA, according to eWEEK:

The Wine project has released version 0.9.13 of its free implementation of a Windows application platform for Linux systems, project manager Alexandre Julliard announced May 12. Wine is an open-source translation layer that allows users to run many Windows applications on Linux and Unix operating systems.