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According to a leak from a BestBuy employee, Microsoft is initiating a sort of "Anti-Linux Training" course for the employees, and those who take part in the said training are rewarded with a copy of Windows 7 for only ten dollars. The leaked screenshots of the campaign show Microsoft's comparison of its own system with an obscure "Linux" and how Windows is better in every way including security, "free downloads", and software and hardware compatibility. When Microsoft said a few weeks ago that its biggest threat was Linux, I suppose a campaign such as this was to be expected. We've...

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway. The Plasma desktop shell comes with a new default theme called Air, which looks a lot less heavy than the previous Oxygen theme. Plasma has also been improved performance-wise, and it takes up less...

Back on Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and found it to offer some terrific performance improvements , but at the same time, there were a few notable regressions. Apple engineers have been working hard at pushing technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), OpenCL, full 64-bit support, and other changes to their OS X stack to bolster its performance capabilities and reduce the overall footprint. Now that we have tested Mac OS X 10.6, we are seeing how its performance compares to that of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be out in October and does have...

SCO's true situation is here, in the latest 8K: Item 1.03 Bankruptcy or Receivership. On September 14, 2007, The SCO Group, Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiary, SCO Operations, Inc. (collectively, the “Debtors”), filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (the “Bankruptcy Court”). The Debtors’ Chapter 11 cases are being jointly administered under Case No. 07-11337(KG). On July 27, 2009, the Bankruptcy Court held a hearing and took evidence on cross-motions consisting of (a) the Debtor’s Motion for the Sale of Property Outside the...

Is security a sword of Damocles hanging over Linux, just waiting for its popularity to reach critical mass? That's one persistent argument in the Linux vs. Windows debates, but it's just wrong, according to those who know Linux well. For reasons both technological and behavioral, they say, Linux really is more secure. "If the anti-malware industry has anything to offer GNU/Linux," challenges blogger Robert Pogson, "let them step up."Among all the reasons geeks choose Linux, security is often near the top of the list.And no wonder -- personal preferences aside on all the other many relevant issues, there's plenty of...

From Slashdot: "Tavis Ormandy and Julien Tinnes have discovered a severe security flaw in all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 on all architectures. 'Since it leads to the kernel executing code at NULL, the vulnerability is as trivial as it can get to exploit: an attacker can just put code in the first page that will get executed with kernel privileges.'" Note: this is a local exploit, not remote. Looks like the fix for this is in the current tree and is being run through the standard processes.  The above link includes all the gory details.

I think we can finally put a certain myth to rest that's been circling around the web for a while now. Microsoft often claimed that netbooks running Linux saw higher return rates than those running Windows, but according to Dell, this is utter nonsense. Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, spoke at OpenSource World, and in his talk he made it quite clear that Dell's Ubuntu netbooks see no higher return rates than the Windows variants, calling it a 'non-issue'. "They are making something of nothing," he said of Microsoft's claims.

Microsoft has long pooh-poohed Linux as a desktop competitor. But a recent filing with the Security and Exchange Commission has the company admitting for the first time that Linux represents a significant threat to Windows. TechFlash reports that in Microsoft's recent annual filing with the SEC, it listed for the first time Ubuntu's maker Canonical, and Linux distributor Red Hat as competitors to its Client division, which makes Windows. Previously, TechFlash says, Red Hat was listed but only as a competitor to its Business and Server & Tools divisions. In its annual filing, Microsoft warns that Linux is a threat...

Red Hat Enterprise clone poised to 'die' CentOS airs dirty laundry as admin 'vanishes' Posted in Operating Systems, 30th July 2009 17:40 GMT According to six concerned CentOS developers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone is poised on the edge of the abyss. In an open letter posted to the CentOS website and the project mailing list, six fellow developers accuse project co-founder Lance Davis of putting the entire project at risk by disappearing from everyday involvement without ceding control to others. "You seem to have crawled into a hole...and this is not acceptable," the letter reads. "Please do not...

So, Microsoft submits 20000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, all licensed under the GPL. Microsoft, who considers Linux a great threat, and once called the GPL a "cancer". Opinions on this one are flying all around us, but what does Linus Torvalds, Linux' benevolent dictator, think about all this?

The first half of 2009 is over and after your summer vacation, you might want to start gearing up for the new distro releases. Once again open source proved that developers collaborating all over the world deliver constant platform improvement. Let’s see what they have in store for us this time.KSplice – Rebootless Kernel UpgradeOne of the arguments I use often when talking about the advantages of using Linux is the fact that you do not have to reboot when installing or upgrading software. Most of the time. Almost every Linux user knows you have to restart your system after...

A recently published attack exploiting newer versions of the Linux kernel is getting plenty of notice because it works even when security enhancements are running and the bug is virtually impossible to detect in source code reviews. The exploit code was released Friday by Brad Spengler of grsecurity, a developer of applications that enhance the security of the open-source OS. While it targets Linux versions that have yet to be adopted by most vendors, the bug has captured the attention of security researchers, who say it exposes overlooked weaknesses.Linux developers "tried to protect against it and what this exploit shows...

Standard and Poor’s announced that Red Hat would join the S&P 500 as of the close of trading on Friday. Red Hat replaces lender CIT Group, which had a market capitalization below $275 million, ranking it 500th in the index. The market seemed to like the S&P news. In after hours trading Friday, Red Hat was up 8.45 percent to $22.34. Red Hat, the fast-growing provider of open source software solutions to enterprise customers, will be added to the S&P 500 GICS (Global Industry Classification Standard) Systems Software Sub-Industry index. The company has been aggressively pursuing new opportunities to help...

Google's revelation that it will create its own operating system will bring just one reaction from operating system enthusiasts worldwide. "Not another Linux distribution," they'll cry. They'll say this because if there is one problem that the Linux and open-source community has suffered repeatedly over the past two decades, it's been fragmentation. It was bad enough that the Unix operating system fragmented repeatedly through the 1980s and 1990s. Systems administrators (like myself, earlier this decade) were forced to learn several different platforms: Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD...the list was always growing longer. But the hojillion different directions Linux has taken over...

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google...

SCO has filed its proposed plan. I have only quickly skimmed it, but what I see immediately is that it wishes to sue Linux users, and it lists a Java patent, and I'm guessing there may just be a connection someday. Who knows? SCO loves to sue, I've decided. It wants to sell some of the Mobility business, retaining part of it, along with selling the Unix business and "many of [SCO's] subsidiaries" to an entity called UnXis. I've never heard of it either. Think there might be trademark issues? Try going to Google and search for "unXis Delaware" and...

Red Hat has announced the release of Fedora 11, the latest version of the leading open-source Linux distribution: "The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating system. The community's eleventh release includes the broadest feature set to date, spotlights developments in software management and sound, improves key virtualization components and introduces Fedora Community, a portal project beta."

In yet another bizarre twist in the interminable legal dispute over source code allegedly illegally copied from UNIX System V into Linux, the SCO Group, which claims ownership of the disputed code, has secured a last-gasp reprieve from the threat of liquidation. Immediately before the crucial liquidation hearing in the bankruptcy court, SCO CEO Darl McBride signed an agreement with a company by the name of Gulf Capital Partners, backed by well-known investor Stephen Norris. Caught out by the surprise development, all parties have agreed to postpone the liquidation hearing until the 16th or the 27th of July. According to...

May 13th, 2009 China's 'secure' OS Kylin - a threat to U.S offensive cyber capabilities? Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 6:23 am Categories: Browsers, Complex Attacks, Governments, Hackers, Kernel-level Exploits... Tags: China, Operating System, Operating Systems, Linux, Software... Picture a cyber warfare arms race where the participating countries have spent years of building offensive cyber warfare capabilities by exploiting the monoculture on one another’s IT infrastructure. Suddenly, one of the countries starts migrating to a hardened operating system of its own, and by integrating it on systems managing the critical infrastructure it successfully undermines the offensive cyber warfare capabilities developed...

Back when the whole netbook thing started, Asus was king of the hill with a focus on netbooks with Linux pre-installed. Since they were kind of popular, it didn't take Microsoft long to start working together with Asus to 'port' Windows XP to the Asus line of netbooks, and with that, to other netbooks as well. The result was that Linux netbooks are now harder to find for many people. While Dell committed itself to Linux on netbooks, Asus has decided to just skip the first date and jump right into bed with Microsoft.