At the time of writing, there are three hundred and twenty three distributions being tracked on distrowatch.com. There’s one called Ehad. And another is called Estrella Roja. Many include the letter ‘X’ in their name, and many feature hand-drawn mascots and disparate communities. Not all are Linux-based, and not all are actively development,
CWmike writes “Adobe Systems has acknowledged that all versions of its Adobe Reader, including editions for Windows, the Mac and Linux, contain at least one, and possibly two, critical vulnerabilities. ‘All currently supported shipping versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat, [Versions] 9.1, 8.1.4 and 7.1.1 and earlier, are vulnerable to this issue,’ said Adobe’s David Lenoe said in a blog entry yesterday. He was referring to a bug in Adobe’s implementation of JavaScript that went public early Tuesday. A “Bugtraq ID,” or BID number has been assigned to a second JavaScript vulnerability in Adobe’s Reader. Proof-of-concept attack code for both bugs has already been published on the Web. Adobe said it will patch Reader and Acrobat, but Lenoe offered no timetable for the fixes. In lieu of a patch, Lenoe recommended that users disable JavaScript in the apps. Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, said of the suggestion in lieu of patches, ‘Unfortunately, for Adobe, disabling JavaScript is a broken record, [and] similar to what we’ve seen in the past with Microsoft on ActiveX bugs.'”
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There are numerous changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. EXOFS and NILFS2 and FS-Cache for AFS und NFS are all new. Although it is now barely maintained, there are also fixes for ReiserFS
The Linux version of Boxee’s eponymously-named multimedia platform has finally been updated to include several new features introduced into the OS X and Windows versions over the past few months. Key additions include an “App Box” and restored support for Hulu.
number6x writes “LinuxDevices.com is reporting that the Open Invention Network has posted the details of three of the eight patents used by Microsoft in the Tom Tom suit (which Tom Tom settled last month), asking the community for prior art. These patents cover aspects of the FAT file system. You can find them on Post-Issue.org — see numbers 5579517, 5758352, and 6256642. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt believes that these three patents are of tenuous validity and will probably not survive a review. Bergelt believes that there’s a good chance that the USPTO may well invalidate them before the end of the year.
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ericatcw writes “Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle’s purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun’s (and soon to be Oracle’s) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun’s tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle’s take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months.”
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Full Linux for the Embedded Systems. Let us explore how to install a full Debian distribution on an emulated ARM926 machine with QEMU.
narramissic writes “A Dutch university has received a .3 million grant from the European Research Council to fund 5 more years of work on a Unix-type operating system, called Minix, that aims to be more reliable and secure than either Linux or Windows. The latest grant will enable the three researchers and two programmers on the project to further their research into a making Minix capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected, said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit. ‘It irritates me to no end when software doesn’t work,’ Tanenbaum said. ‘Having to reboot your computer is just a pain. The question is, can you make a system that actually works very well?'”
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jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It’s a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the “Somniloquy” device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
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“Microsoft’s model is not working anymore,” thundered trade journal InformationWeek. “Netbooks hammer Windows revenues for second straight quarter,” declared Greg Keizer of ComputerWorld, another respected trade weekly. – Also, trying to vendor-lock users to the IE browser by making web-apps that only work well with it, is a “Losing Strategy”.
