Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
End of Linspire, Freespire Moving to Debian Base
Xandros announced late last week the end of the Linspire distribution. This announcement comes just months after the aquisition of Linspire by Xandros. Linspire originally went by the name of Lindows and has bragged itself up for being the first Linux to be sold at a large US retailer, namely Wal-Mart. Xandros already maintains two other pay-for Linux distributions: Xandros Desktop Professional and Freespire. Xandros has also announced that Freespire will be shifting back to a Debian base rather than the Ubuntu base of late. Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos says the moves are to reduce the amount of code bases the company needs to support and to bring an emphasis to stability and consistency from the Debian core. Typaldos says also to expect the CNR package management software seen in Linspire to appear in the Xandros and Freespire distributions.
According to the website, you can currently purchase computers with Linspire pre-installed from a large amount of major retailers including Wal-Mart, Buy.com, and Amazon. Although the timing is interesting since the acquisition happened such a short time ago, the changes should allow Xandros to focus more on doing one (or two) thing[s] well rather than having to maintain three different distributions. Xandros seems to be learning a lesson from Novell and Red Hat, using Freespire as its community-based testing and proving grounds for its pay-for, supported Linux distribution.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 12th, 2008
SugarCRM CEO on Success of Open Source
One of my coworkers ran across this podcast of John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM talking on the success of open source software. John talks about the strengths of using open source applications in the enterprise. Definitely worth a listen!
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 11th, 2008
Linux Foundation Releases AppChecker
The Linux Foundation has released a beta of what some are calling the next killer application in Linux development. The application is called “AppChecker” and is a tool to help Linux software developers to check their applications for cross-distro compatibility. According to the Linux Foundation, its features are:
1. Checks for cross-distro portability and gives a good indication of how well the app may perform on various distributions of Linux”
2. “Gives guidance for application developers on how to enhance the portability of their applications”
3. “Gives a good indication of how close the app is to LSB certification”
The application will run your new binaries through a test to see which libraries are required and give a report on the compatibility of your application on different distributions.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 10th, 2008
Zimbra Desktop Added to Ubuntu Repositories
Everyone’s favorite offline mail client was added to the Ubuntu repositories. Zimbra Desktop beta 3 has been added to the 32-bit partner repositories with 64-bit support coming soon. I’ve been using Zimbra Desktop for a few weeks and enjoy the offline built-in integration with my Zimbra accounts. Since I run multiple Zimbra systems, I have always fought trying to have the integration with both Zimbra accounts within the same mail client. You can add external accounts into the Zimbra web client, but not with the built-in integration with the calendars, contacts, tasks, etc.. It’s still a bit buggy and missing some features, but it appears to be a promising start to a great extension to the Zimbra Collaboration Server. To install Zimbra Desktop on Ubuntu 32-bit, make sure the partner repositories are enabled and run ‘sudo apt-get install zdesktop‘ from the command line. If you’re not running Ubuntu Linux, there’s package downloads for other distros of Linux or packages for Windows or Mac as well.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 9th, 2008
Vista’s Security Rendered Useless
Security researchers Mark Dowd and Alexander Sotirov discovered an exploit on Windows Vista that bypasses all the memory protection Microsoft has been bragging about for Windows Vista. The vulnerability uses IE or any other browser to load content into “any location they wished on a user’s machine using a variety of scripting languages, such as Java, ActiveX, and even .NET objects”. The big problem here is not that this is a bug in the implementation, but rather a flaw in the logic Microsoft used to write the protection around Windows Vista. Other researchers have said that there’s not a lot Microsoft can do about it, and it basically means “game over” for Vista. The next few days/weeks/months should definitely be interesting in how this plays out.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Aug 8th, 2008
Follow whatan00b on Twitter