Spring has sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where them birdies is. Welcome to Blogrotate. It’s Good Friday here in Ottawa, a holiday for us. For this reason it’s going to be a short one this week. That and the fact that it’s 25C and sunny here. :)
Operating Systems
Closure sweet closure. It’s been 7 years but SCO has finally lost it’s silly lawsuit against Novell. Novell smugly posted the results on their site with Decision in the SCO Group vs. Novell Jury trial. For us linux users they state for the record “Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on the intellectual property front”. This victory means that the case against IBM is the next to fall, followed by the demise of what was once a giant in the industry. The full history of this case can be found on GrokLaw, try SCO Group v. Novell, Inc for starters. A high level summary can be found at SCO loses again: jury says Novell owns UNIX SVRX copyrights.
Ubuntu 8.04 is approaching end of life. The last LTS (Long Term Support) release will stop getting software updates and security patches at that time. If you are running 8.10 fear not, the next LTS (10.04, Lucid Lynx) is in beta and should be released prior to this date. According to the Ubuntu site there is a clean upgrade path directly from 8.04 to 10.04, see their LucidUpgrades page for more info. Also see Ubuntu 8.10 approaches end-of-life at The H Online.
I’ve been saying this for years regarding every version of Windows, but if you don’t believe me read 90 percent of Windows 7 flaws fixed by removing admin rights.
Hardware
AMD has released it’s new 12 core Opteron CPU, code named “Magny-Cours”. While it’s not news that there’s more cores in a new CPU, there are additional benefits. See AMD’s 12-core chip may cut software costs.
Security
For those of you running Internet Explorer, Microsoft has released a patch to address security issues with it’s widely used browser software outside of it’s normal “patch Tuesday” release cycle. You can read more at C-Net in Microsoft issues emergency patch for 10 IE holes.
Threat Post is reporting that a hacker security researcher has found a way to exploit Adobe Reader with no other plugins required. “The PDF hack, when combined with clever social engineering techniques, could potentially allow code execution attacks if a user simply opens a rigged PDF file” says the aritcle. Check out the full details at Hacker Finds a Way to Exploit PDF Files, Without Vulnerability.
Humorous
Do you like the online comic xkcd? Well now it’s even better using the xkcd CLI (Command Line Interface).
Well that’s all we’ll have time for this week. Have a great Easter weekend everyone. As always, your comments and favourite news stories are welcome.
1 Comment. Leave new
I just wanted to clarify that 8.04 is not approaching end-of-life. The article is mentioning end-of-life for 8.10, a standard release. The server editions of both of the current LTS releases, 6.06 and 8.04, are still supported. They are supported until June 2011 and April 2013, respectively. See Ubuntu’s Releases page for end-of-life dates.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
As noted, there are two upgrade paths to 10.4: upgrading from the current standard release, 9.10, or from the most recent LTS release, 8.04. Users of 6.06 will need to upgrade to 8.04 first, while users of 8.10 or 9.04 will need to upgrade to 9.10. Note that users of 8.10 specifically will need to upgrade to 9.04 before they can upgrade to 9.10.