sdasher writes "Ksplice has started offering Ksplice Uptrack for Ubuntu Jaunty, a free service that delivers rebootless versions of all the latest Ubuntu kernel security updates. It's currently available for both the 32 and 64-bit generic kernel, and they plan to add support for the virtual and server kernels by the end of the month, according to their FAQ. This makes Ubuntu the first OS that doesn't need to be rebooted for security updates. (We covered Ksplice's underlying technology when it was first announced a year ago.)"

twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything MS would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'" Update: 06/27 20:22 GMT by T : Read on below for one Mono-eschewing attempt at getting the (excellent) Tomboy's functionality, via a similar program called Gnote. Update: 06/27 21:07 GMT by T: On the other side of the coin, reader im_thatoneguy writes "Jo Shields, a Mono Developer, has published an article on 'Why Mono Doesn't Suck,' why it is not a threat to FOSS, why it is desirable to developers and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default."

Marten writes "It was more than a year ago that Walter Bender left OLPC and started SugarLabs.org. Now, the first version of the new project has been released. Sugar on a Stick is a USB drive that runs on Mac and PC-style hardware. 'The open-source education software developed for the "$100 laptop" can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to give aging PCs and Macs a new interface and custom educational software.' Bender said, 'What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost. It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.'"

eldavojohn writes "SCO lost last year and began the bankruptcy filings a long time ago but PJ has some speculative bad news on what they retain through the bankruptcy proceedings. SCO proposes to sell a number of assets to an outfit called UnXis, which PJ characterizes this way: 'It starts to hint that this is more a renaming, taking in some new management who seem to have financial expertise, and SCO keeps skipping along as unXis, with the dangerous litigation spun off safely into a litigation troll.' In their filings SCO says they retain 'their litigation and related claims against International Business Machines Corporation, Novell, Inc., AutoZone Corporation, Red Hat and certain Linux users which are not material customers of UnXis (excluding certain large-scale users of Linux servers) that are claimed to have infringed against UNIX copyrights.' So that's still a possibility they could go after anyone who is a 'certain Linux user.' And what's even worse is that they'll retain a patent for running multiple Java applications on a single Java virtual machine. We may not be out of the SCO litigation woods yet."

eldavojohn writes "Groklaw brings us news of Microsoft holding the smoking gun in regards to the death of Linux on netbooks. You see, the question of Linux on netbooks in Taiwan was put forth to the Taiwan Trade Authority director, who replied, 'In our association we operate as a consortium, like the open source consortium. They want to promote open source and Linux. But if you begin from the PC you are afraid of Microsoft. They try to go to the smart phone or PDA to start again.' It's simple; fear will keep them in line. PJ points out, 'So next time you hear Microsoft bragging that people prefer their software to Linux on netbooks, you'll know better. If they really believed that, they'd let the market speak, on a level playing field. If I say my horse is faster than yours, and you says yours is faster, and we let our horses race around the track, that establishes the point. But if you shoot my horse, that leaves questions in the air. Is your horse really faster? If so, why shoot my horse?'"

An anonymous reader writes "There have been past claims by Adobe and others that development on Linux is a jungle, particularly with regards to audio. However today, the author of the popular 'The Sorry State of Sound in Linux' has posted a follow up showing Adobe's claims to be FUD, as well as being a good update on where OSS and ALSA are holding today, and why PulseAudio isn't a good idea."

ericatcw writes "Google's Android may enjoy the hype, but an increasing number of key industry players say the mobile OS isn't ready for ARM netbooks, aka smartbooks. Nvidia is the most recent to declare Android unfit for duty, stating its preference for Microsoft's Windows CE, which an Nvidia exec praised for having a "low footprint" and being "rock solid." Nvidia is busy optimizing its multimedia-savvy Tegra system-on-chip for Windows CE. Such improvements won't arrive for at least a year to Android, which has an inflexible UI and poor graphics support for devices larger than a smartphone, says Nvidia. Other firms echoing similar criticism include ARM and Asustek."

clemenstimpler sends a link to Groklaw, which has been following the proceedings dealing with the conversion of SCO's bankruptcy to Chapter 7 (i.e., liquidating the company). SCO has announced a prospective buyer. "...SCO has suggested it has a buyer. That doesn't mean it will avoid Chapter 7 of course, nor does it mean that the bankruptcy court will OK the suggested sale. But it likely does mean more delay, which is what this is likely all about. SCO very much wants to wait until the appeals court rules in SCO v. Novell. ... Hearing set for July 16 with backup for July 27. SCO has already moved to make it July 27. combo hearing on convert and sale. Frankly, it would not totally amaze me if the three entities that filed motions to convert were to appeal this. If not, SCO got its desired delay."

pallmall1 writes "OS News reports that Debian developer Josselin Mouette got Tomboy accepted as a dependency for gnome in the next release of Debian (codenamed Squeeze). While that may seem like nothing big (except for the 50 MByte size of the Tomboy package), Tomboy requires Mono — meaning that Mono will now be installed by default. Apparently, Debian doesn't have the same concerns over using specifications patented by Microsoft and licensed under undisclosed terms that Red Hat does. Perhaps Debian doesn't believe that Microsoft might do something like Rambus did."

RazvanM writes "This is an attempt to visualize the relationships among the Linux File Systems through the lens of the external symbols their kernel modules use. We took an initial look a few months back but this time the scope is much broader. This analysis was done on 1377 kernel modules from 2.6.0 to 2.6.29, but there is also a small dip into the BSD world. The most thorough analysis was done on Daniel Phillips's tree, which contains the latest two disk-based file systems for Linux: tux3 and btrfs. The main techniques used to establish relationships among file systems are hierarchical clustering and phylogenetic trees. Also presented are a set of rankings based on various properties related to the evolution of the external symbols from one release to another, and complete timelines of the kernel releases for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. In all there are 78 figures and 10 animations."

pavithran writes "Does SAP, one of the largest business companies offering software solutions, support FOSS as a movement? Why is SAP looking at closed and open source in a similar way? This shows lot of ambiguity in SAP's attitude towards open source software. I found an interesting article in Linux Journal on whether SAP is an open source friend or foe, by Glyn Moody. Here's a quote from the article: 'For an outfit that calls itself "the world's largest business software company," the German software giant SAP is relatively little-known in the open source world. With 51,500 employees, a turnover of 11.5 billion euros ($16 billion) last year, and operating profits of 2.7 billion euros ($3.8 billion), SAP is clearly one of the heavyweights in the computer world. Given that huge clout, SAP's attitude to open source is important; and yet it is hard to tell whether it is really free software's friend or its foe. ... A company that wished open source well would back these ideas. One that really supported free software would also fight against software patents. So, while SAP's involvement in Eclipse and investment in open source companies is welcome — and pretty self-interested, it has to be said, given that it presumably hopes to make a profit on them — it's not really enough cancel out its unhelpful attitude and statements elsewhere. If it wants to be a serious, respected player in the world of open source, as befits its size, it must do better.'"

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Neowin.net "Sarah Sharp, a self-styled 'geekess' and Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center who has recently been working on the Linux USB subsystem, announced on her blog that support of USB 3.0 will soon be integrated into the Linux kernel. This makes Linux the first operating system to support the standard. If you can't wait and have the expertise necessary, she includes instructions on how to get USB 3.0 support in Linux now." Here's Sharp's post.

ruphus13 writes "Dell has been offering Linux-based machines for a while, especially its Server-class machines. Now, Dell has decided that there are several open source applications that are ready for mainstream consumers. From the post, 'While we've all been speculating about whether Dell is working on Android netbooks, the computer hardware and software vendor was busy bundling open source applications to offer to small- and medium-sized business customers looking for low-cost alternatives to commercial software. The pre-configured "SMB-in-a-box" software is only available in the US for now, but Dell expects to launch a similar offering in Asia by the end of 2009... Although no specifics have been given about which apps are included in Dell's first bundle, it is aimed at the retail sector.' It is going to be interesting to see what Dell picks as the 'must-have' applications for the SMB market."

diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released. The list of new features includes NILFS2 (a new, log-structured filesystem), a filesystem for object-based storage devices called exofs, local caching for NFS, the RDS protocol (which delivers high-performance reliable connections between the servers of a cluster), a new distributed networking filesystem (POHMELFS), automatic flushing of files on renames/truncates in ext3, ext4 and btrfs, preliminary support for the 802.11w drafts, support for the Microblaze architecture, the Tomoyo security MAC, DRM support for the Radeon R6xx/R7xx graphic cards, asynchronous scanning of devices and partitions for faster bootup, the preadv/pwritev syscalls, several new drivers and many other small improvements."

rexx mainframe writes "Fedora 11 is now available on BitTorrent. Fedora 11 offers ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well. Fedora 11 features Presto, a yum plugin that reduces bandwidth consumption drastically by downloading only binary differences between updates. It also features Openchange for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. There are new security enhancements, improved and upgraded development tools, and cutting-edge features in areas such as virtualization."

Barence writes "Novell plans to bring the wealth of open-source software to everyday users through an 'open-source apps store.' 'I would compare what's happening on netbooks with what's happening to the smartphone,' Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development at Novell told PC Pro. 'There's a core experience, but then the ability to customise that experience. On the user end, all they'll see is an open-source applications store with one-click downloads of new software. Unlike the other stores though, they won't have to pay for any of those applications, which will be very attractive.'"

Charbax writes "At Computex in Taipei on June 2-6th, several companies unveiled ARM-powered laptops that are cheaper ($99 to $199), last much longer on a regular 3-cell battery (8-15 hours) and can still add cool new features such as a built-in HDMI 720p or 1080p output, 3D acceleration, connected standby and more. The ARM Linux laptops shown as working prototypes at Computex will run Ubuntu 9.10 (optimized for ARM), Google Android, Xandros OS for ARM, or some Red Flag Linux type of OS. In this video, the Director of Mobile Computing at ARM, is giving us all the latest details on the status for the support of full Flash (with all actionscripts), the optimizations of the web browser (accelerating rendering/scrolling using the GPU/DSP), the stuff that Google is working on to adapt Android 2.0 Donut release for laptop screens and interfaces and more. At Computex I also filmed an interview with the Nvidia team working on Tegra laptops, the Qualcomm people working on Snapdragon devices and the Freescale people doing their awesomely thin ARM laptops in cooperation with manufacturers such as Pegatron as well."

Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of 'Free Software' vs 'Open Source.' Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focusing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."

Dan Kegel (who admits to being a Chrome developer) writes to point out a post from Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, Product Managers for Google Chrome, with some good news for non-Windows users who want to play with Chrome: "In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux (for a couple of different Linux distributions), but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software." (The announcement continues below.)

An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.2.4 has been released. See the release announcement for details." Barring a "security issue or another grave bug," this is the end of the KDE 4.2 line, which means for distros based on long-term support, it might be the thing to get used to for a while.