Mozilla Firefox 0.9 Released, Jun 15, 2004

The Mozilla Foundation today released Mozilla Firefox 0.9, and now begins its final push towards a 1.0 release of Firefox. New features in this release include a new default theme, a new browser migration tool, reworked theme and extension managers, a much smaller download size, a new help system, and many small bug fixes and speed tweaks. More on what's new can be found in the Burning Edge's Bigger Picture or in the Mozilla Foundation's press release about Firefox 0.9.

Along with the new Theme and Extension managers, is a preview of the new update.mozilla.org website, which will be the new home for themes and extensions for all the Mozilla products, as well as possible updates to the products themselves. The site is expected to be completed sometime in the next week.

A Linux bug was recently uncovered by a young Norwegian programmer that, when exploited by a simple C program, could crash most Linux 2.4 or 2.6 distributions running on an x86 architecture.

"Using this exploit to crash Linux systems requires the (ab)user to have shell access or other means of uploading and running the program—like cgi-bin and FTP access," reports the discoverer, Øyvind Sæther.

When Linux creator Linus Torvalds first started talking about world domination in the late 1990s, he delivered the line mostly in jest.

Microsoft, the current world ruler, stopped laughing a long time ago.

It doesn't seem realistic to think Linux's free, open-source operating system will knock Microsoft Windows off its throne any time soon. Indisputably, though, Linux and the vast array of free software surrounding it have emerged as a viable desktop computing alternative - for those willing to dig into the installation instructions and tackle the odd setup puzzle.

Bloomberg News reports that Linux has officially won 14,000 municipal desktops in Munich, Germany, after a year-long decision process that saw Microsoft reduce their pricing and merited a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Baller. The 82-member city council formally votes tomorrow on a proposal to dump Windows NT for Linux. Bloomberg says a published agenda for the meeting notes the switch to open source.

IBM is taking its love of Linux to South America, introducing consulting services to promote the open-source operating system in Brazil.

IBM's Global Services division on Monday detailed the services it is offering corporations in Brazil that are interested in using Linux on desktop PCs, point-of-sale terminals and other devices. The strategy is part of IBM's larger push to sell Linux-based hardware and services to compete against Microsoft.

Open Client Desktop services will be sold to companies in the retail, financial and government industries. IBM earlier this year realigned its software and services organizations to sell to corporations along industry lines.

Asia's dominant Linux distribution, Turbolinux, has notched another win to provide the operating system for the China Ministry of Railways. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Under the agreement Turbolinux will install and deploy Turbo HA, its high availability server application on 160 servers as well as 300 copies of Turbolinux Server. The system is intended to help modernize the Chinese package delivery process which is operates in tandem with the postal service and railways.

Yes, by Zenas Hutcheson, St. Paul Venture Capital.

Now is the time to begin implementing open source IP telephony.

Open-source business models are changing market dynamics. Open source, coupled with subscription-based software licensing, is now a widely accepted business model with significant momentum. Linux and Red Hat are the best examples of the successful pairing of open-source technology (Linux) with a subscription-based software license (Red Hat).

No, by Zeus Kerravala, The Yankee Group.

In theory, an open-source IP telephony system will increase the demand for IP telephony, create better interoperability between IP phone systems and drive down the cost of IP telephony by putting price pressure on the traditional phone system vendors. An open-source model for IP telephony might yield these results at some time in the distant future, but it will have no such effect in the short term, for a number of reasons.

The school district wants to move its Oracle database and Business Objects Crystal Enterprise business-intelligence software from Windows to Linux., and the debut of Business Objects' Crystal Enterprise 10 for Linux moved it a step closer to that goal.

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of its Express line of server-based applications, IBM on Monday said it is shipping a Linux-based version of Content Manager Express to beta testers and also touted plans to deliver the product on its iSeries platform shortly, with both the Linux and iSeries versions intended for midsize companies.

Company officials claim the beta delivery of Content Manager Express marks the first Linux-based offering for content management sculpted specifically for the midsize markets. They believe the offering will give cash-strapped IT shops a way to adopt a much lower cost solution for managing lots of unstructured data.

 View older news this year: Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999