I haven't kept this as up to date as I'd like but the stuff that is here is good to know. I'm going to modify it so other people can add sections to it and it can be a living document, but until then this is all you get.
The past few weeks or so, there's been a lot of interest in a supposed battery status report bug in Windows 7. After installing Windows 7, some users reported seeing "consider replacing your battery"-warnings in systems that appeared to be operating just fine on Windows XP or Vista. After extensive research, Steven Sinofsky has now explained on the Engineering 7 blog that the fault is not with Windows 7 - it really, really is your battery.
"The 'Llano' processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU - instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an 'application processor unit', or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die."
Developed by industrial designer Barton Smith, the Stream Adaptive Computer System is an interesting take on making computing easier and more adaptable to suit the user's current needs. Today, he also unveiled the operating system and user interface that would run on Stream. It's... Amazing.
"The scuttlebutt is that IBM seemed perfectly content to wait until May to launch the Power7-based Power Systems servers, but something changed and compelled the company to move up the announcement of its first machines using the eight-core processor to today. Big Blue is not in a habit of explaining its motives or its timing for product launches, but it seems clear that IBM wanted to get out in front of a whole lot of processor and systems launches that are expected between now and the summer."
Mozilla has announced that they are going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger definitively. "Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then," Josh Aas writes, "We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this."
We've been working on an "OSNews version 5" upgrade for several months, and with several months to go, we decided to make some incremental changes to OSNews on the existing codebase. The major change, as you probably already noticed, is that we've removed the "Page1/Page2" tabs and instead have OSNews stories with original content and commentary in one column, and news, items on OS-related topics gleaned from other sources in the other. Read on for more details on the changes we've implemented. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...
You may remember that back in November last year, I wrote about the lack of a decent Paint.NET-like application for Linux (or, more specifically, for Gtk+ distributions, since Qt has Krita). As it turns out, this compelled Novell employee Jonathan Pobst to code a Paint.NET clone in Gtk+ using Cairo. Version 0.1 is here, and it's remarkably advanced for something so young.
Later this month, Microsoft will most likely unveil Windows Mobile 7 Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress. Rumours abound, and the latest set of rumours paint a rather dramatic turnaround for Microsoft's mobile platform - no more multitasking, application distribution limited to official channels, and a whole lot more.
"The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs. Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7. The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it."
A quick round up of various web-related news items. First up, a new open source product entitled the "Highgate media suite" will bring OGG video decoding to Silverlight. Microsoft have just joined the SVG working group (arguably 10 years late, but it's better than nothing). Adobe promise significant improvements in Flash 10.1, including Core Animation rendering on OS X and lowered CPU usage. Finally, CoperLicht--a WebGL JavaScript 3D engine (Quake in JS will be here one day)
In a way, it's kind of sad. The old media squealing and squirming, trying pathetically to hold on to a time that has long been lost to the sands of... Well, time. Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, made such a pathetic attempt before a US Congress committee yesterday, claiming Boxee stole Hulu's content.
"Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM's regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap."
With all the virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.
"The Mono Project releases the first preview of Moonlight 3.0, giving application developers a first look at the open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 technology for the Linux platform." Sadly, it's still Firefox-only.
Finally something we can work with. While both the iPad and the Joo Joo are technically still vapourware, people have at least had the opportunity to play with the former, while the latter remained somewhat illusive. Now that the device has been set to ship at the end of this month, Ars Technica finally had some time to play with the Joo Joo and talk to Fusion Garage's CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan. There's good news, and there's (potentially) bad news.
Bret Lambert (blambert@), your friendly OpenBSD hacker in Norway, writes in about some hardware requests that have been added to want.html recently.
The requests focus on (for now) unsupported or partially supported hardware that is under active development. Machines like the Lemote Yeelong, more SGI hardware and USB infrared dongles are being asked for and Bret asked some of his fellow developers why they requested this gear. Please read on for their replies.
Read more...
Michael Dexter from BSD Fund writes in with an update on pcc developments:
Anders Magnusson (ragge@) reports that pcc can now build a bootable OpenBSD -current x86 kernel and that amd64 support is coming soon. Your testing using a fresh snapshot is greatly appreciated.
Please report any bugs in the pcc bug database and be as precise as possible. Code samples are welcome.
We'd like to thank Jonathan Gray (jsg@) for finding many code-generation bugs that were revealed by the kernel and also the dozen donors who contributed a total of over $750 to this effort this month, bringing us less than $3,000 from our goal.
This is great news for software projects in general, as it is another step to try to diminish the GCC monoculture and for OpenBSD specifically as this marks the first architecture kernel that can be compiled with this compiler with hopefully many more to come.
Claudio Jeker (claudio@), our favourite network hacker from Zürich, Switzerland, writes in with a story about his work on ospf6d:
A few days ago I decided it was time to enableldpd(8) and ospf6d(8) in the builds
since without additional attention they will never get finished. ldpd still
needs a kernel with option MPLS enabled to be usable but this does not really
matter here. This is about ospf6d and what drives me crazy about IPv6.
Check out the rest of Claudio's adventures in IPv6 land below.
Read more...
Tunnelling out of corporate networks - logs, collection and analysis
I haven't heard too many people say good things about log analysis or monitoring but in reality it can be really simple and effective. More importantly, if you take the necessary steps to reduce your network to exposure to malware, log monitoring becomes really easy and fun.
Read on to find out more about how we collect and analyse logs:
Am 16.09 und 17.09.2006 findet in Essen der LinuxTag Essen, Com2Linux, statt. Auch hier wird allBSD wieder zugegen sein um die BSD-Systeme zu präsentieren. Mehr Informationen finden Sie hier.
Das allBSD Projekt hat neue Flyer rund um die BSDs erstellt und stellt diese als PDF Dokument zum download bereit. Auf dem Linuxtag 2006 in Wiesbaden werden diese Flyer auf dem BSD-Stand ausgeteilt werden.
Der LinuxTag berichtet in einer News auch über das Engagement der BSDs auf dem diesjährigen Linuxtag.
In der neusten Ausgabe des freeX Magazins (http://www.freex-online.de/) wird über das allBSD Projekt berichtet. Desweiteren gibt es in dieser Ausgabe eine Reihe weiterer BSD-Artikel:
- FreeBSD auf dem IBM-Blade Center - DSL Multihoming mit NetBSD - Bluetooth unter FreeBSD - Lazarus und FreeBSD
Seite heute steht das Vortragsprogramm für den LinuxTag 2006 fest. Am Freitag dem 05.05.2006 wird es in Saal 6.2 den ganzen Tag Vorträge über BSD geben. Mehr Informationen zu den Vorträgen entnehmen Sie bitte hier und hier.
allBSD ist auf der CeBIT von 12.-15.März 2006 im Bereich LinuxPark und teilt sich den Stand mit anderen Open Source Projekten. Siehe hierzu: http://www.allbsd.de/events/cebit/index.html
Dru Lavigne, bekannt durch ihre Kolumnen bei O´Reilly, das Buch "BSD Hacks" und Ihr Engagement für eine BSD-Zertifizierung, hat ein online Diskussion mit Daniel Seuffert, Wilhelm Bühler und Axel S. Gruner geführt. Dabei geht es um die Ambitionen von allBSD.de, was der Slogan "push it, dont hype" zu bedeuten hat und wie man allBSD unterstützen kann.
Jürgen Dankoweit ist nun auch Mitglied bei allBSD.de. Er hat in der Vergangenheit viele FreeBSD Flyern erstellt und arbeitet nun aktiv bei allBSD.de mit.
Seit heute haben Sie die Möglichkeit in Ihren Kalender die hier angekündigten Events automatisch eintragen zu lassen. Hier können Sie die ICS-Datei abonnieren.
allbsd-announce - als Ankündigungsliste (Newsletter) allbsd-events - zur internen Organisation von Events (öffentlich) allbsd-misc - für sonstige Themen rund um allBSD.de (öffentlich)
Zur Bündelung der Aktivitäten zum Cebit-Stand 2006 der BSD-Projekte geht die Domain allBSD.de online. Geplant ist, bis Weihnachten 2006 eine Mailinglliste und ein Grundgerüst der Webseiten zu BSD aufzusetzen.
