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Red Hat Software

Fedora 15 Released 171

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the ooo-shiny-new-features dept.
halfline writes "Fedora 15 was released today. It features GNOME 3 (with its substantially redone UI) and the systemd init system by default." The release also brings the latest KDE and XFCE versions, improved Btrfs support, amd a switch from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice. Installation images are available from the usual sources.
Red Hat Software

Linux Gets Dynamic Firewalls In Fedora 15 176

Posted by Soulskill from the changing-on-the-fly dept.
darthcamaro writes "Linux users have long relied on iptables for in-distro firewall setup. The upcoming Fedora 15 release changes that and introduces us to new dynamic firewall technology. 'Most Linux systems use IP tables type firewalls and the problem is that if you want to make a change to the firewall, it's hard to modify on the fly without reloading the entire firewall,' Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith said. 'Fedora 15 is really the first mainstream operating system to have a dynamic firewall where you can add or change rules and keep the firewall up and responding while you're making changes.'"
Red Hat Software

Red Hat Pushes Out Enterprise Linux 6.1 90

Posted by timothy from the so-there-are-now-two-distros dept.
wiredmikey writes "Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the platform since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 back in November 2010. The latest version brings improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, and support for upcoming system hardware. The latest version also delivers patches and security updates as well as enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource management and high availability." The Register, too, outlines the new release.
Patents

Red Hat CEO On Patent Trolls: Just Pay Them Off 167

Posted by timothy from the take-this-cash-and-shove-it dept.
jbrodkin writes "Although Red Hat fights patent lawsuits when it deems it necessary, CEO Jim Whitehurst says it's often just better to pay the trolls to make them go away. 'When it's so little money, at some point, bluntly, it's better to settle than fight these things out,' Whitehurst said. Red Hat has been forced to pay out claims to the likes of FireStar Software and Acacia, and Whitehurst indicated Red Hat has paid off various other companies behind closed doors. 'Some of them are [public] but we often seal them in settlement,' he said."
Java

Red Hat Uncloaks 'Java Killer': the Ceylon Project 623

Posted by timothy from the as-sung-by-the-bad-brains dept.
talawahdotnet writes "Gavin King of Red Hat/Hibernate/Seam fame recently unveiled the top secret project that he has been working on over the past two years, a new language and SDK designed to replace Java in the enterprise. The project came out of hiding without much fanfare or publicity at QCon Beijing in a keynote titled 'The Ceylon Project — the next generation of Java language?'"
Linux Business

Red Hat Nears $1 Billion In Revenues, Closing Door On Clones 201

Posted by timothy from the playing-within-the-rules dept.
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat is almost at its goal of being the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in Revenues. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2011 revenues this week which hit $909 million. Going forward, Red Hat has already taken steps to protect its business by changing the way it packages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel, making it harder for Oracle to clone. 'We are the top commercial contributor to most of the components of the Linux kernel and we think we have a lot of value and we want to make sure that, that value is recognized,' Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said. 'In terms of competition, I don't think we necessarily saw anything different from before but I'd say better to close the barn door before the horses leave than afterwards.'"
Google

Google Names Winners For Summer of Code 2011 84

Posted by timothy from the we-salute-those-about-to-goggle dept.
akgraner writes "Google has announced the accepted projects list for its 2011 Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Program. Ryan Rix emailed the Fedora announce mailing list to let users know Fedora was one of the projects that had been selected, while Daniel Holbach informed Ubuntu users via his blog that Ubuntu had not been selected."
Patents

Red Hat Paid $4.2m To Settle Patent Suit 48

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-a-lotta-CDs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "'Red Hat paid $US4.2 million to settle a patent infringement suit brought against it by FireStar Software, an intellectual property activist claims. Florian Mueller, who made a name for himself during the campaign to prevent the adoption of software patents in Europe some years ago, said he had dug up a court filing that showed the payment had been made.' Mueller says the payment made by Red Hat was kept secret but news about it surfaced in another suit."
Red Hat Software

Red Hat Stops Shipping Kernel Changes as Patches 184

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the clearly-the-best-solution dept.
mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."
Networking

Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme 132

Posted by timothy from the shock-horror-horror-shock dept.
dkd903 writes "Fedora developer Matt Domsch has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming. The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, the actual problem starts."
Open Source

Fedora Infrastructure Compromised 115

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "The infrastructure of the Fedora Project was compromised over the weekend and an account belonging to a Fedora contributor was taken over by an attacker. However, Fedora officials said they don't believe that the attacker was able to push any changes to the Fedora package system or make any actual changes to the infrastructure. The attack appears to have targeted one specific user account, which had some high-value privileges. The attacker was able to compromise the account externally, and then had the ability to connect remotely to some Fedora systems. The attacker also changed the account's SSH key, Fedora officials said."
Red Hat Software

Alternative To the 200-Line Linux Kernel Patch 402

Posted by timothy from the you-go-first dept.
climenole writes "Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 line Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a Red Hat developer, replied to Linus Torvalds on a mailing list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file."
Censorship

Fedora Project Drops SQLNinja 'Hacker' Tool 159

Posted by kdawson from the dual-use dept.
simonb writes, "In what can only be described as a fit of insanity, the Fedora Board have declared a 'hacker tool' not fit for entry into their software repositories. Today your SQL injection tools, tomorrow your nmap?" The Register links the Fedora board's meeting minutes. From the story: "The move came on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Fedora Project's board of directors rejecting a request that SQLNinja be added to the archive of open-source applications. It came even as a long list of other hacker tools are included in the bundle and was harshly criticized by some security watchers. 'It seems incredibly short sighted to reject software based on perceived legal usage,' said Jacob Appelbaum, a full-time programmer for the Tor Project. 'They have decided to become judges of likely usage based on their own experience. That is a path of madness.' ... [T]he board unanimously decided to add a new statement to Fedora's legal guidelines concerning the inclusion of hacking tools. ... Smith said the language is intended to clarify its stance on a class of software that can be used both to secure and penetrate protected networks."
Operating Systems

Can Windows, OS X and Fedora All Work Together? 375

Posted by timothy from the like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke dept.
greymond writes "In my ever growing job responsibilities, I've recently been tasked with documenting our organization's IT infrastructure, primarily focusing on cost analysis of our hardware leases and software purchases. This is something that has never been done in our organization before and while it's moving along slowly, I'm already seeing some places where we could make improvements. Once completed, I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail. However, this would result in three departments each running a different system: Windows, OS X, and most likely Fedora. Has anyone worked in or tried to set up an environment like this? What roadblocks did you run into? Is this really feasible or should I just continue to focus on the cutbacks that don't require OS changes? (The requirement for having three different systems is that the vast majority of our administration, who rely solely on an install of Microsoft Windows, Word and Excel, are savvy enough that if they came in and saw Gnome running on Fedora with Open Office they'd pick it up fast. However, our marketing department is composed entirely of Apple systems, and the latest Adobe Creative Suite doesn't seem to all work under Wine. The biggest issue is with the Sales department though, as they rely on a proprietary sales platform that is Windows only — and generally, sales personal give the biggest push back when it comes to organizational changes.)"
Red Hat Software

Red Hat Releases RHEL 6 228

Posted by samzenpus from the new-kid-on-the-block dept.
alphadogg writes "Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues."
Patents

Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76

Posted by Soulskill from the making-it-go-away dept.
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
Patents

Red Hat Urges USPTO To Deny Most Software Patents 175

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-giving-it-away dept.
Julie188 writes "The United States Patent and Trademark Office asked for public input on how it should use the Supreme Court's Bilski decision to guide it when granting new patents. Not surprisingly, Red Hat took them up on it. The USPTO should use Bilski and the fact that the machine transformation test is 'important' to Just Say No to most software patents, it advised. Rob Tiller, Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP, is hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."
Red Hat Software

No More Need To Reboot Fedora w/ Ksplice 262

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stacking-your-nines dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ksplice, the technology that allows Linux kernel updates without a reboot, is now free for users of the Fedora distribution. Using Ksplice is like 'replacing your car's engine while speeding down the highway,' and it can potentially save your Linux systems from a lot of downtime. Since Fedora users often live on the bleeding edge of Linux development, Ksplice makes it even easier to do so, and without reboots!"
Desktops (Apple)

What To Do With an Old G5 Tower? 417

Posted by timothy from the such-a-beautiful-exterior dept.
lunatic1969 writes "I've got an old G5 PowerPC tower that's sitting in a spare room not seeing much in the way of use. I'd like to stick a Linux distribution on it and maybe breathe some life back into it. I've got a few vague ideas — it might be a handy file server, streaming video for a security system, or simply just to have a spare box around. My question is therefore in two parts: First, are there any particularly creative projects or ideas anyone has for an old G5, and second and most important, which distribution currently offers the best support for this box?"
Businesses

Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies? 487

Posted by Soulskill from the free-as-in-give-us-money dept.
Glyn Moody writes "If open source is such a success, why aren't there any billion-dollar turnover open source companies? A recent briefing by Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, to a group of journalists may provide an answer. Asked why Red Hat wasn't yet a $5 billion company, as he suggested it would be one day, he said getting Red Hat to $5 billion meant 'replacing $50 billion of revenue' currently enjoyed by traditional computer companies. If, as is likely, that's generally true for open source companies, it means they will need to displace around $10 billion of proprietary business in order to achieve a billion-dollar turnover. Few are likely to do that. Perhaps it's time for managers of open source startups to stop chasing the billion-dollar dream. If they don't, they will set unrealistic ambitions for themselves, disappoint their investors, and allow opponents of free software to paint one of its defining successes — saving money — as a failure."

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