Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!
Operating Systems
Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Of note are that Red Hat has completed its migration from Xen to KVM as the supported virtualization technology (which began with RHEL 5.4), and that ext4 is now the default filesystem.
There have been a couple of tidbits of news in the Ubuntu world. The first being a bug with memory leakage in X.org affecting beta 2 of Ubuntu 10.04. The discussion on Slashdot became a debate on the merits of time vs scope-based release schedules. Per the bug report, a fix has since been committed, which is good because — and this leads into the second bit of news — Ubuntu has announced the availability of the release candidate for 10.04. Things are moving fast as we approach its release next Thursday.
And for something that’s not release announcement related, M. Tim Jones has an interesting article over at IBM’s developerWorks about Kernel Shared Memory in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. Without going into a lot of detail (I’ll let him do that), it’s basically the implementation of a daemon to handle de-duplication of memory pages. This has obvious implications in a virtualization environment as there is the potential to run more virtual machines on a host without increasing the memory footprint.
Security
The big news on this front was that McAfee pushed out a virus definition update that falsely identified svchost.exe as a threat, resulting in Windows automatically rebooting. Peter Bright from Ars Technica has some good coverage of this, and linked to McAfee’s official solution. Meanwhile, Dave Courbanou over at The VAR Guy has a follow up on the situation with some additional detail, and Barry McPherson from McAfee has posted an official response stating that a ‘small percentage’ of enterprise accounts were affected. And finally, Ben Grubb of ZDNet Australia reports that Coles had 10 percent of its point-of-sales terminals affected and shut down stores in WA and South Australia as a result.
Software
Oracle has decided to charge for an ODF plugin for MS Office which allows users to import/export documents in Open Document Format. Matt Asay, COO at Canonical, provides some commentary on this stating that “$9,000 is the new ‘free’ for Oracle“.
Jono Bacon, Canonical’s Community Manager, wrote that Canonical has made the single sign-on component of Launchpad available as open source under the AGPL3 license. There is some coverage from The H on this as well. Launchpad itself was released under the AGPL3 license about a year ago.
Hardware
On a final (interesting) note, ‘Cyber Cynic’ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that HP and Likewise to release Linux-based storage line about HP and Likewise partnering on a line of StorageWorks products that will make use of the Likewise CIFS stack to support Active Directory authentication.
Well, that’s all I have time for this week. Will Brad be back at the helm next week, or will I continue my reign? You’ll just have to wait and see…
1 Comment. Leave new
Great stuff Bill, thanks for taking this on this week. I’ll be back next week assuming Bill does not direct me towards any elevator shafts.