FreeSoftNews

Oracle’s bid to steal business away from Red Hat has thrust the world’s largest Linux software distributor into an extremely challenging position. It might even signal the beginning of the end for Red Hat, industry analysts and insiders said.
Red Hat’s shared tumbled 25 percent Thursday after Oracle, the giant database software company, said it would offer support services for Red Hat’s open source Linux software—at half the price Red Hat currently charges. The move was almost certain to cut into the lucrative support contracts that Red Hat relies upon for the bulk of its revenues, prompting some industry watchers to suggest the Linux upstart could become a takeover target for Oracle.

Read more at RED HERRING

“Firefox 2.0 has had over two million downloads in 24 hours with a peak rate of over 30 downloads a second. This means Firefox is well on track to beat IE7’s three million in four days. Of course stats don’t equal users but it’s interesting to see that the demand for Firefox is currently outstripping IE.”

Slashdot

Ghosts and goblins, haunted houses, and smashed pumpkins—sometimes the most harrowing horrors are only steps away from your cubicle or office.

Just ask Steven Calderon.

Calderon was in his second week working as security guard for Fry’s Electronics when Anaheim, Calif., police walked in and arrested him for crimes including child molestation and rape.

Fry’s had requested a background check on Calderon, which was done by The Screening Network, a service of ChoicePoint, the $1 billion-a-year data broker based in Alpharetta, Ga. When it came up with criminal warrants and felony charges, nobody—not Fry’s, not the police—stopped to ask if the data supplied by ChoicePoint was accurate.

The Thirteen Scariest Things in IT Slide Show

Read more at eWeek

Upgrading an operating system is always a chancy thing. An application can stop working, a modem can freeze up, and then, when upgrading to Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft, you can lose your graphical user interface: windows, icon, mouse pointer, and all… Not good.

The Ubuntu Forums are currently full of plaintive cries for help, such as: “I had no problems upgrading from Breezy to Dapper but Dapper to Edgy has left me high and dry.” And: “I have big problems with X server. Ver 6.06 worked perfect, but after upgrade on my Dell Latitude D610, X server is not working at all.”

Read more at DesktopLinux.com

A company paper Google published internally earlier this year and which I got hold of outlined some of Google’s big goals and directions for 2006. The list included several items, for example:

• Google wants to have an improved infrastructure to make their engineers more productive. This includes allowing employees to have a universal search tool “containing all public Google information searched on all Google searches.” Google also wants to build 10MW of green power to be on track to be carbon neutral. (They also want to reduce “Borg disk waste” by 50%… hmmm, Borg?)
• Google wants to be the best in search – no surprise here. To reach that goal, Google wants to have the world’s top AI research laboratory. They are also focusing on getting rid of spam in the top 20 user languages, and increasing the accuracy of information they collect (through measures such as annotation). Another part of improving search is to always launch crucial user interface updates “that people love.”
• Google wants to push their ad system. E.g. in 2006, one of their aims was to sell $1B of new inventory. Google feels that if they make the world’s inventory available “marketers will come.”

Read more

“Ars Technica and The Register are reporting the Apple Kernel 10.4.8 has been cracked using Apple’s publicly available source trees. This is the first time Apple was hit by hackers again since Maxxuss silently left the scene.The funny thing about this is the hacker who cracked OSx has released his sources according to APSL. He told Ars Technica in an interview that he did this because he believes in freedom of information, but will this now harm Apple’s opensourceness?”

Read more at Slashdot

I’m pleased to announce the release of Rekall 2.4.4. This release can be
downloaded from

http://www.rekallrevealed.org/packages/

For those unfamiliar with Rekall, Rekall is a database front end, in
the style of Access, Knoda and Kexi.

The most notable changes since 2.4.2 are:

* ODBC and SQLite3 drivers
* Tests and test suite functionality

• Read more: Rekall 2.4.4

The Free Software Foundation - Latin America (FSFLA) is campaigning against the Brazilian government’s regulations that some citizens must use non-free software for paying taxes. Referring to the software as “Softwares Impostos,” a term that puns in Portuguese on “taxes” and “imposed,” FSFLA has launched a letter-writing campaign against the requirement, arguing that it is both contrary to current social policies and a violation of the Brazilian constitution.

Read more at NewsForge

With Firefox 2.0 out the door earlier this week, Mozilla Corp. will turn its attention to version 3.0, said company executives, with a goal to deliver the new browser in 2007.

Officially Firefox 3.0 but code named “Gran Paradiso,” the application will pick up where Firefox 2.0 leaves off, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s director of engineering. Among the features Mozilla wants to get into 3.0 is “Places,” the revamped bookmarks tool which was dropped from Firefox 2.0 in April.

informationweek.com

One of the most addictive Linux games, Frozen Bubble, just got updated to version 2.0.0. The new version brings you a new singleplayer game mode (multiplayer training), network (LAN, Internet) game mode (up to 5 players), fully revamped graphics, full joystick support, recording and playback of all games with non-predefined levels and more.

Read more at LinuxLookup

Well, Fedora Core 6 finally released after a couple of delays. Here is the official announcement. As I say this, the fedora site seems to be down , maybe because of the number of downloads taking place currently. What’s interesting to note here is the community buzz surrounding this release of Fedora Core. There is none!

The one good review I found is available here. Rahul Sundaram has his ‘Inside Fedora Core 6′ article on RedHat Magazine. Of course Slashdot and Digg did carry the release coverage and the news made it to the front page.

But what is missing here is the Linux newbie reviews. The teenager who got his first copy of the Fedora Core distro and ran to blog about it. The ‘Fedora Core rokxorx!’ reviews are missing.

Read more

HP claims it has started to make higher margins from open source than proprietary software in some instances, due to the support costs associated with migration.

Speaking to ZDNet UK on Wednesday, HP’s open source and Linux chief technology officer Bdale Garbee said that open source margins are sometimes higher than for Microsoft-based solutions. “In some cases, the margin can be greater to us because we can provide a more complete solution to customers,” said Garbee, speaking at the LinuxWorld event in London.

LinuxLookup

O’ReillyNet looks at Python 2.5. “This article provides a rundown of the new and important features of Python 2.5. I assume that you’re familiar with Python and aren’t looking for an introductory tutorial, although in some cases I do introduce some of the material, such as generators.”

Oracle’s announcement yesterday of its “Unbreakable Linux 2.0″ program, aimed squarely at Red Hat, understandably overshadowed another announcement Larry Ellison made in the same speech. The fact that Oracle will provide cut-rate support for Red Hat Linux is of course big news, and if you have any doubt that Oracle thinks so, too, check out Oracle’s home page today , which is entirely dedicated to its Linux news (even featuring the commanding presence of a body-armored penguin with clear steroids-abuse issues). You’ll find an audio link to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s speech there as well. And if you check out their News page, you’ll see that as part of Oracle’s media blitz, it issued a total of 8 press releases yesterday.

consortiuminfo.org

Shares in Red Hat plunged 30 percent to a new 52-week low of $13.70 on Thursday morning following software giant Oracle’s announcement on Wednesday that it would move into the Linux software space.

By 11:30 a.m., more than 58 million shares had traded hands – nine times the daily average.

Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) closed at $19.51 on Wednesday but the share price dropped dramatically in overnight trading to Thursday’s opening price of $15.80.

http://www.localtechwire.com/article.cfm?u=15371

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.
Read more…

This is release 0.9.24 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

What’s new in this release:
- Support for multiple monitors using Xinerama.
- Various MSI fixes and improvements.
- A ton of memory leaks fixed.
- Many common controls fixes.
- Lots of bug fixes.

• Read more: Wine release 0.9.24

DarkWorld is a space-based massively multiplayer real-time strategy game. Each player starts off with their own home planet. From there they can build ships, start exploring the universe, colonize other planets, and attack other players. What makes this game unique is that the game is always running at a very slow speed even when you are not connected. When you send a ship to another planet, it may not arrive for hours or days, and likewise the message it sends back may not arrive for hours or days. This allows many players to engage in a real-time strategy game that could last for months. New players can join the game at any time.

Read more at linuX-gamers.net

I’m glad to announce the first beta of openSUSE 10.2 codename Basilisk
Lizard for PowerPC.

Our developers fixed bug #213873 which made installation on PowerPC
impossible and we’ve mastered media for PowerPC now as well.

Note that the factory tree still has an old broken installation images
and will only be updated with the next sync, please install from CDs
or DVD.

• Read more: openSUSE 10.2 Beta1 for PowerPC available

The Xubuntu community is happy to announce the release of Xubuntu 6.10,
codenamed “Edgy Eft”. This release includes both installable Desktop CDs
and alternate text-mode installation CDs for several architectures.

Xubuntu is a Linux distribution for your desktop or server, with a fast
and easy install, regular releases, a tight selection of excellent
packages installed by default, every other package you can imagine
available with a few clicks.

• Read more: Xubuntu 6.10