Ubuntu for netbooks, Jun 06, 2008

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has introduced a version of Ubuntu that is specially designed for netbooks – mini notebooks modelled on the Eee PC – that are being presented by various providers at Computex.

Bob Muglia, who handles servers and tools for Microsoft, has announced a further expansion of system management at Microsoft's Management Summit 2008. With the usual modesty we have come to expect of Microsoft, Muglia said in Las Vegas that IT management and enterprises would be re-defined – nothing more, nothing less.

The Fedora Project has released a "preview" version of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution for download via Bittorrent. Shortly beforehand, the Project had adjusted the timetable for Fedora 9 and the Linux distribution is now scheduled for release on May 13, two weeks later than originally planned.

Yankee Group market researchers have presented the results of a study on server and operation system reliability for 2007. Compared to the previous year, annual downtime on all systems has dropped sharply – except on Windows server 2000 and 2003.

The development team behind the Fedora Project, which is primarily sponsored by Red Hat, today released the first test version of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution, planned for late April, for download - just under two weeks later than originally planned.

Version 6.0 of Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) represents a change of direction for Terra Soft Solutions. Fedora has been largely replaced by CentOS as the basis for the distribution. This should make it easier for the distributor to maintain the distribution for Power Architecture, as the CentOS development team maintain their distribution significantly longer than Fedora, which is more focused on new software.

France's gendarmerie has apparently taken quite a liking to such open source software as Firefox and OpenOffice. Now, there are plans to migrate 70,000 workstations in the country's largest administrative complex to Linux according to a report in the French daily L'Express

Asus's budget notebook EeePC is causing a price slide: Taiwanese manufacturer FIC appears to have plans for offering its mini notebook CE260 including 7" display and VIA C7-M processor considerably cheaper soon.

Renewed proceedings have been brought against the SCO Group GmbH [Ltd.] and its apparent managing director Mike Olson by the Bonn-based Tarent GmbH as well as the Bremen-based Univention after derogatory remarks about Linux had re-appeared

With its new affiliate, the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) intends to promote the certification of Linux professionals across Europe. LPI-Central Europe will be responsible for Germany, Austria, Switzerland as well as for the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Microsoft is making its Virtual Machine Additions for Linux available for download in a 32- and a 64-bit version. Installing the software is said to improve the running of Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as guest systems under Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005.

The never ending story surrounding SCO's litigation over alleged copyright infringements contained in Linux as well as the copyrights to Unix has taken yet another twist: The SCO Group, currently subject to proceedings under Chapter 11, is causing a stir as details in relation to their payment obligations emerge.

While work on Firefox 3.0 continues, the developers at the Mozilla Foundation have released a new update for the 2.x series of its open-source web browser. Firefox 2.0.0.8 is already available in several languages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The new version is also being gradually distributed via the browser's automatic update function.

Six years after the project was launched, developers at the Xiph.Org Foundation have released a beta version of the free video codec called Ogg Theora. The source code of the libtheora 1.0 Beta 1 codec library can be downloaded from the developer website.

In regard to the national decision-making process for the requested standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500 for Open XML (OOXML), the relevant standards subcommittee at the German Institute for Standardisation (DIN) voted with 13 to 4 in favour of Open XML as a standard.

If the two formats could in fact represent the exact same data, there would be no reason for MS-OOXML to exist. And there would be no excuse for Microsoft not to use ODF natively for its office application.

The administration behind the Bundestag has reacted to criticism from the Linux Association concerning the call for tenders for an IT project.

Version 1.0 of NTFS-3g, a free NTFS driver for Linux, has been released. Project manager Szabolcs Szakacsits has declared the driver ready for productive use

Once there the components will automatically appear in the Linux distributions, which upon detecting hardware for the most part automatically configure everything that is required.

On February 7, the CHiC massive parallel Linux cluster with 2,152 processors distributed across 538 server nodes went into operation in Chemnitz.