cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

C. Craig Ross let me know that the 2006 Linux Symposium has issued their 2006 call for papers The conference is being held from July 19th thru the 22nd up in luverly Ottawa, Canada. OLS has been a phenomenal show in the past, and I highly recommend it for people looking for a "meaty" show. Proposals for papers will be accepted from January 1st - February 1st, so get writing.

segphault writes "Ars Technica reports that Mirus has teamed up with Linspire and plan to ship budget desktop PCs with Linspire preinstalled. From the article: 'Designed specifically for optimal Linux compatibility, the Mirus Koobox line computers feature AMD processors and Linspire preinstallation. The Koobox systems, which start at US$299, will come with a variety of open source applications, including Firefox and OpenOffice. [...] At this point it is hard to assess the potential of the Koobox systems. If it succeeds, the product could help legitimize desktop Linux and bring it further into the mainstream. Regardless of how many get sold, the availability of yet another budget Linux PC illuminates the growing popularity of the Linux platform, and contributes to the perception that Linux is applicable to desktop computing. With Dell selling low-cost computers sans OS, and Apple selling the popular Mac Mini at a price that doesn't look as much like typical Apple extortion, Mirus is going to have to fight an uphill battle to pick up a worthwhile chunk of the desktop PC market.'"

Michael writes "Microsoft Corp.'s Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively 'put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything.'"

blast3r wrote to mention a ZDNet Blog posting by George Ou, stating that WINE is still vulnerable to the WMF flaw. From the article: "All applications launched inside Wine, Cedega, or Cross-Over Office are technically still exploitable. Wine runs on most x86 platforms, including Linux and the various BSDs. The surprising part about finding this flaw in Wine is that they implemented the entire Meta File API without realizing that this could be a security issue. Exploiting a Windows application running inside Wine depends on that application calling the vulnerable function with malicious data."

Andy Updegrove writes "Massachusetts has appointed ITD COO Beth Pepoli as the acting CIO of the Commonwealth. At the same time, the Governor's Communications Director, Eric Fehrnstrom, has made the clearest statement yet that it is ODF that the new CIO will be implementing: 'There have been no changes in the commonwealth's published OpenDocument rules, and we are still on track for a January 2007 implementation.' We reported on the resignation of Peter Quinn in December.

Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Gazette has a new filesystem benchmarking article, this time using the 2.6 kernel and showing ReiserFS v4. The second round of benchmarks include both the metrics from the first filesystem benchmark and the second in two matrices." From the article: "Instead of a Western Digital 250GB and Promise ATA/100 controller, I am now using a Seagate 400GB and Maxtor ATA/133 Promise controller. The physical machine remains the same, there is an additional 664MB of swap and I am now running Debian Etch. In the previous article, I was running Slackware 9.1 with custom compiled filesystem utilities. I've added a small section in the beginning that shows the filesystem creation and mount time, I've also added a graph showing these new benchmarks." We reported on the original benchmarks in the first half of last year.

Joe Barr writes "Joe Brockmeier and I have teamed up in a story on NewsForge to point out how the mainstream and trade press misrepresent the annual summary of vulnerabilities from US-CERT. They're doing it again this year to make it appear as if it is more secure than UNIX/Linux. Pamela Jones did a similar report at Groklaw over the weekend." From the article: "One figure represents the vulnerabilities found in Windows operating systems: XP, NT, 98, and so on. The other represents a total figure not just for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, the BSDs, and Linux, but for a hundred different versions of Linux. The sum of all the unique vulnerabilities from all the Linux distros does not equate to the sum of vulnerabilities in any single Linux distro, and one could say the same about the various versions of Windows. That's why it is a completely meaningless exercise to discuss those totals as if they present an accurate picture of the relative security of Windows and Linux. " We've reported on the US-CERT list already this year. NewsForge is a sister site to Slashdot.org, both of whom are owned by OSTG.

An anonymous reader writes "The most polished Yellow Dog Linux has been released with the usual distribution updates such as kernel 2.6.15-rc5, KDE 3.4.2, GNOME 2.12.1, and GCC 3.4.4 as well as support for new hardware such as new PowerBooks and preliminary support Dual and Quad-core G5s. Other new features include firewire drive installation and booting, PCMCIA modem and cellphone card support, and Atheros wifi card support."

rm69990 writes "According to Groklaw, SCO now seeks to amend their complaint against Novell. SCO says it 'seeks leave to file a Second Amended Complaint in significant part in consideration of the counterclaims that Novell asserted in its Answer and Counterclaims.' SCO now accuses Novell of infringing SCO's copyrights by distributing SUSE Linux, of breaching a non-compete clause between the two companies, and SCO is also asking for specific performance forcing Novell to turn over the Unix copyrights to SCO. So SCO is essentially admitting that Novell owns the copyrights at this point, but is saying that Novell breached the contract (that specifically excluded copyrights) by failing to transfer them to Santa Cruz."

Phil817 writes to tell us that Bob Metcalfe recently gave a TV interview in which he stated that current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated clunkers that wont be able to adequately handle the coming of "video internet" and suggests that new operating systems need to be developed to take hold in a few years. Also, when asked if current deals in the works like eBay's purchase of Skype were an indication of more investment hype he replied with "I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun.". Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.15 has been released after two months and a week of development. You can check the comprehensible changelog (google cache) or grep the full changelog. There are some new features like shared subtrees, UDP fragmentation offload, PPP MPPE encryption (VPN), NTFS write support (except for creating files), PPC64 thermal improvements, support for the late-2005 powerbook series, SATA passthru support (neccesary for SMART), console rotation for fbcon, nf_conntrack subsystem, some scalability and performance improvements, and lots of other changes. As always, download it from www.kernel.org"

An anonymous reader writes "What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article from IBM, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each." From the article: "Most simply, a boot loader loads the operating system. When your machine loads its operating system, the BIOS reads the first 512 bytes of your bootable media (which is known as the master boot record, or MBR). You can store the boot record of only one operating system in a single MBR, so a problem becomes apparent when you require multiple operating systems. Hence the need for more flexible boot loaders.""

An anonymous reader writes "David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available for download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticized for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg."

diegocgteleline.es writes "Being a long time Gnome user and while talking with some non-KDE users, I realized that non-KDE users know few things about what are the "Good Things" of KDE. So I wrote an article about "Why KDE Rules" focused in KDE, with lots of screenshots and some texts - so all those non-KDE (or non-Linux) users can take a look at what KDE can offer to them, why KDE users use it and what they can expect about the future of the KDE platform if they choose to use it. Of course, this doesn't means that this was written to critize other desktops neither it means you should start Yet Another Gnome vs KDE flamewar..."

JohnTyler writes "This article at XYZ Computing takes a look at Linux's strange naming practices. When compared to their Window's equivalents, the names of many Linux programs are difficult to recognize and even tougher to remember. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is actually an important usability issue. Just think, if you had to do a bit of graphic design which would be easier to pick out of the menu, GIMP or Photoshop? Or if you wanted to play a song, Media Player or xine?" The article is a bit thin, but it raises an excellent point.

An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year since their last update aMSN has published version 0.95. New features include 'webcam support, tabbed chat windows, improved skin plugin support, new file transfer protocol, many new plugins (like Ink and Nudge support), an improved bug report system, as well as LOTS of bug fixes.' In addition to many new features and fixes the aMSN site has been given a face lift to (hopefully) facilitate ease of use."

norburym writes "The Bruce Perens Open Source Series of books published by Prentice Hall PTR is a strong collection of nearly 20 volumes focusing on Linux and open source technology. Edited by Linux guru and former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader, Bruce Perens, the books are aimed toward developers, sysadmins and power users. Several months following the release of a new print volume, a free electronic version is made available on Prentice Hall PTR's web site. The series includes some excellent editions including Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide (2nd ed.), Linux Quick Fix Notebook and PHP 5 Power Programming. The newest book by Mark Wilding and Dan Behman, Self-Service Linux: Determining Problems and Finding Solutions, is another well-written and worthy companion to this series." Read the rest of Mary's review.

Karma Sucks writes "As reported in the latest free edition of LWN the Bluetooth Qualification Administrator has demanded that the Linux BlueZ project take down the highly-useful Bluetooth hardware compatibility list for Linux with the intimation that 'As neither of these products have been qualified using Linux it is illegal to make them available for public use'. This was apparently done at the request of a registered member of the Bluetooth SIG. Anyone know who this member was?"

Marco Ghirlanda writes "There is an Italian Public founded Research and Technology Park -- the Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park which is hosting a Hollywood-like film studio, the Lumiq Studios The Lumiq Studios and is investing a lot of resources in creating a Debian based multimedia distribution, Mediainlinux wich is basically two lines of Linux Live CD, one based on Knoppix and one made from scratch (Mediainlinux 3) for 2D, 3D, Audio and Video pre and post production. ML needs testing outside our production environment and our school. "