IT News

New Releases in the OSS world

• VirtualBSD

  It’s not actually a new member of the BSD family, but an interesting way to try it out if you’ve never had a chance to run an xBSD operating system before

• nftables

  A new firewall for the Linux kernel — an interesting development, although it’s still in an early Alpha stage.

• Linux Kernel 2.6.29 (see the full changelog)
• Mono 2.4 This is a release focused on stability and performance, but it is also the foundation for Novell’s own long-term support Mono-based product.
• MonoDevelop 2.0

  Continue reading "Featured News and Articles [ March 2009 ]"

  Posted by Marcus Friedman

  975 hits
  Last modified on 2009-04-17 15:10
  

Introduction

Starting this month, I’ll be publishing a special monthly article highlighting some of the most relevant news about Linux and open source software. You’ll also find links to articles that can be of interest for system administrators, software developers and IT professionals in general. [ If you’d like to follow these news as they happen, you’re welcome to join me on Twitter : @marcusfriedman ]

This will be the general structure of these monthly posts:

1. New releases in the OSS world.

   As you know, there are hundreds of new releases every month, and there are sites like Freshmeat devoted to cover them. Here I’ll only include those releases that are truly relevant for the OSS community in general. I am aware that it’s almost impossible not to miss something important given the volume of new releases, so if you find something missing that you think that should be included, please let me know. Please note that I won’t be covering distribution releases, except for those related to Debian and those that are somehow noteworthy or groundbreaking.

2. New tools, services and other online resources
3. Suggested readings
4. General news

New Releases in the OSS world

• Debian Lenny
• X Server 1.6.0

  X Server 1.6 introduces the server bits for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2 (the 3D bits can already be found in Mesa and the Intel driver), X Input 1.5 with device properties, Predictable Pointer Acceleration, and RandR 1.3. Beyond those key features, there are also a number of bug-fixes, EXA improvements, and various other improvements.

• Xfce 4.6.0

Continue reading "Featured News and Articles [ February 2009 ]"

Posted by Marcus Friedman

Debian Lenny was officially released today, almost two years after its previous version.

This release includes several important improvements. The following list highlights just a few of them:

• Linux kernel 2.6.26
• Xen 3.2.1
• Hypervisor independent virtual machine management (supports kvm, xen, qemu, kqemu)
• qemu can now use hardware-based virtualization (KVM)
• Graphical front-end for virtual machine management
• Xorg 7.3 (the X server autoconfigures itself with most hardware)
• LXDE desktop environment
• Full support for the Asus Eee PC

Some people criticize Debian because of the extended period between stable releases. I think that’s unfair. The only time in Debian’s history when there was a truly extended period between releases was during the transition from Woody (July 2002) to Sarge (June 2005). Every Debian version since 1.1 (except for Sarge) was released in less than 24 months from the previous one. [ see Debian release history ]

Although it would be nice to have a shorter release cycle (for example, 18 months), I think that for a distribution like Debian, anything under 24 months is acceptable. Let’s not forget that Debian isn’t just an average distribution: it offers 3 development branches, it supports more than 10 different hardware architectures, it comes with more than 23,000 software packages and it has a reputation of being the most reliable non-commercial distro available. It seems obvious that you cannot release new versions of such a complex product every year and still maintain its reliability. And Debian developers take the word stable pretty seriously.

Continue reading "Debian Lenny is ready for you. Are you ready for Debian?"

Posted by Marcus Friedman