Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Red Hat Outs Fedora 17
Red Hat has released its Fedora 17 ‘Beefy Miracle’ distribution just over a month after Canonical released its Ubuntu 12.04 distribution.
The Red Hat sponsored Fedora project serves as the proving ground for new features that eventually end up in the firm’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. Now Red Hat has announced that it has released Fedora 17 including updates to Gnome, Eclipse, GIMP and Openstack along with numerous patches.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution might have shunned Gnome 3 in favour of its Unity desktop interface but Red Hat continues to stick with Gnome in Fedora, shipping Gnome 3.4 as its default window manager. Fedora 17 also includes GIMP 2.8 and Openstack Essex, while developers who like to live on the edge can run Eclipse Juno, the full release of which is expected later this year.
Fedora project leader Robyn Bergeron said, “I am extremely proud of the Fedora 17 release. The addition of projects such as Ovirt [virtual machine management] and JBoss Application Server 7, enhancements in Openstack, and continued support for fresh releases of desktop environments demonstrate the Fedora Project’s commitment to deliver rich features and capabilities. This, combined with our leading-edge innovations at the operating-system level, truly makes Fedora 17 a comprehensive and robust operating system for all types of users.”
Will Linux See Growth Next Year?
Canonical has said it expects Ubuntu to ship on 18 million PCs next year.
Having just launched Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is bullish about its future, with Chris Kenyon, its VP of sales and business development forecasting that the firm’s operating system will ship on 18 million machines in 2013. According to Phoronix, Kenyon claimed that will amount to five per cent of worldwide PC shipments.
Kenyon’s prediction represents more than double the number of PCs shipped currently with Ubuntu and while that might seem optimistic the firm has been on a roll when it comes to OEM support. Prior to Canonical’s launch of Ubuntu 12.04 it announced certification for HP Proliant servers, and yesterday it revealed that it has been working with Dell on an Ubuntu image for Dell’s headline XPS 13 ultrabook.
Although Kenyon mentioned PC unit sales, it is unlikely to forecast a similar growth in servers pre-installed with Ubuntu despite the firm’s certification for some Proliant servers.
Kenyon believes that most firms buy bare metal servers and load their own tweaked images. He said, “As a point of fact the vast majority of this [Ubuntu on servers] is not sold pre-installed. […] Pre-install in the server market is just irrelevant, it is not how the market works. Even when something gets pre-installed an enterprise will wipe it because they will have their own image. [OS pre-installation] is a distraction [for servers, but] it’s a very applicable question in the client world.”
IBM Goes After Apache’s Tomcat
Java Developers looking for a mobile-friendly platform could be happy with the next release of IBM’s Websphere Application Server, which is aimed at offering a lighter, more dynamic version of the app middleware.
Shown off at the IBM Impact show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Websphere Application Server 8.5, codenamed Liberty, has a footprint of just 50MB. This makes it small enough to run on machines such as the Raspberry Pi, according to Marie Wieck, GM for IBM Application and Infrastructure Middleware.
Updates and bug fixes can also be done on the fly with no need to take down the server, she added.
The Liberty release will be launched this quarter, and already has 6,000 beta users, according to Wieck.
John Rymer of Forrester said that the compact and dynamic nature of the new version of Websphere Application Server could make it a tempting proposition for Java developers.
“If you want to install version seven or eight, it’s a big piece of software requiring a lot of space and memory. The installation and configuration is also tricky,” he explained.
“Java developers working in the cloud and on mobile were moving towards something like Apache Tomcat. It’s very light, starts up quickly and you can add applications without having to take the system down. IBM didn’t have anything to respond to that, and that’s what Liberty is.”
For firms needing to update applications three times a year, for example, the dynamic capability of Liberty will make it a much easier process.
“If developers want to run Java on a mobile device, this is good,” Rymer added.
The new features are also backwards compatible, meaning current Websphere users will be able to take advantage of the improvements.
However, IBM could still have difficulty competing in the app server space on a standalone basis, according to Rymer.
Intel Appears To Be Dedicated To Tizen
Comments Off on Intel Appears To Be Dedicated To Tizen
As we know Intel is not a total Windows 8 and Android shop. Although MeeGo was abandoned by Nokia in favor of huge investment from Microsoft, but Intel will continue to develop MeeGo and it will also add Tizen to its OS effort.
Tizen is a free open source mobile operating system based on Linux and backed up by Linux foundation. Tizen is planned to work on Atom N2800 and N2600 processors or simply said Cedar Trail platform and it was supposed to be out of Beta by end of Q1 2012. If all goes according to schedule it will reach its gold status by mid of Q2 2012. At some point it will also get an application store too, but release schedule is yet to be set in stone.
Intel believes that Tizen combines the communities and best technologies under one unified environment. MeeGo is supposed to have Strong developer community and LiMo should bring broad service provider support to this marriage. They will have strong support for HTML 5 and WAC (wholesale application community).
Tizen is supposed to work on ARM as well as on x86 and we can expect the first devices, or at least prototypes, to show up by the end of the year. Once it gets out it should cover mobile phones, tablets, netbooks, smart TVs and in-vehicle entertainment systems.
Apache Finally Goes To The Cloud
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Hadoop 1.0.
The open source software project has reached the milestone of its first full release after six years of development. Hadoop is a software framework for reliable, scalable and distributed computing under a free licence. Apache describes it as “a foundation of cloud computing”.
“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop.
“Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security,” he added.
Apache Hadoop allows for the distributed processing of large data sets, often Petabytes, across clusters of computers using a simple programming model.
The Hadoop framework is used by some big name organisations including Amazon, Ebay, IBM, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo.
Yahoo has significantly contributed to the project and hosts the largest Hadoop production environment with more than 42,000 nodes.
.
Is Qualcomm A Threat To Intel?
Intel tried to do gaming graphics cards and it failed, but when it comes to CPUs for desktop and notebooks, it is currently dominating the market. Even the graphics used in Intel’s latest integrated CPUs these days are quite decent for multimedia and even some basic gaming.
Still, Intel is now shifting its focus and it sees Qualcomm as its main competitor in years to come. We heard this from high ranked sources from within Intel who believe that Qualcomm is the only ARM company that has it all, and Intel wants to take it on.
Intel is carefully watching Nvidia and Texas Instruments, again two strong ARM players, but it still thinks Qualcomm has better time to market, more customers and a much stronger portfolio.
Intel should start shipping Medfield just in time for Windows 8, and in case you’ve missed it, Medfield is a SoC (System on Chip) platform that should find its place to a few tablets and probably even some phones next year. Since Intel is trying to speed development up and put as much pressure on ARM players as possible, its next generation SoC will also come before the end of 2012, and it will use the advanced 22nm process, something we won’t see in ARM chips next year.
.
Intel, Samsung Behind New Phone OS
October 3, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Comments Off on Intel, Samsung Behind New Phone OS
Two Linux software groups have decided to collaborate, they said on Wednesday, to develop a new operating system for cellphones and other devices in partnerships with Intel and Samsung Electronics.
However, analysts said the new Tizen platform is likely to struggle to attract wider developer and manufacturer support to compete with the dozen or so other mobile operating systems in a market dominated by Apple and Google’s Linux-based Android.
Even industry majors Nokia and Hewlett-Packard have canceled their mobile platforms this year.
“The best hope for them is that big operators get worried by Android’s increasing smartphone dominance and decide to consciously switch their allegiances to rival platforms to restrict Google’s huge influence over the mobile market,” said analyst Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.
LiMo Foundation and the Linux Foundation said the new Tizen platform is an open-source, standards-based software platform that supports multiple devices including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks and in-vehicle ‘infotainment’ systems.
The initial release is planned for the first quarter of 2012, enabling the first devices using Tizen to come to market in mid-2012, the two groups said.
The Linux Kernel Got Hacked
Servers that are part of the Linux kernel.org infrastructure were affected during a recent intrusion where attackers managed to gain root access and plant Trojan scripts.
According to an email sent out to the community by kernel.org chief administrator John Hawley, known as warthog9, the incident started with the compromise of a server referred to as Hera. The personal colocated machine of Linux developer H Peter Anvin (HPA) and additional kernel.org systems were also affected.
“Upon some investigation there are a couple of kernel.org boxes, specifically hera and odin1, with potential pre-cursors on demeter2, zeus1 and zeus2, that have been hit by this,” Hawley wrote.
The intrusion was discovered on 28 August and according to preliminary findings attackers gained access by using a set of compromised credentials. They then elevated their privileges to root by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability that the kernel.org administrators have yet to identify.
Fortunately, logs and parts of the exploit code were retained and will help the investigation. A Trojan was added to the startup scripts of affected systems, but gave itself away through Xnest /dev/mem error messages.
According to the kernel.org admins, these error messages have been seen on other systems as well, but it’s not clear if those machines are vulnerable or compromised. “If developers see this, and you don’t have Xnest installed, please investigate,” the administrators advised.
The good news is that the exploit failed on systems running the latest Linux kernel version, 3.1-rc2, which was released two weeks ago. This is possibly the fortunate consequence of one of the bugfixes it contains.
Download Defense Added To Chrome Browser
Comments Off on Download Defense Added To Chrome Browser
Google has updated Chrome to version 12, adding a new feature that warns users when they’ve downloaded files from dangerous Web sites.
New to Chrome 12 is a tool that flags questionable files pulled from the Web. Chrome now shows an alert when users download some file types from sites that are on the Safe Browsing API (application programming interface) blacklist, which Google maintains.
The messages reads: “This file is malicious. Are you sure you want to continue?” If they wish, users can ignore the warning and install the file on their system’s hard drive.
“This warning will be displayed for any download URL that matches the latest list of malicious websites published by the Safe Browsing API,” said Google last April when it debuted the feature in an earlier edition of Chrome.
Safe Browsing already identifies suspicious or unsafe sites, then adds them to a blacklist. Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari all tap into Safe Browsing to warn users of risky sites before they actually visit them.
PC Sales Up This Year
The research firm Canalys is stating that overall worldwide PC sales grew by seven percent last quarter. The firm is report believes the Apple’s iPad was the main factor for the increase. Nevertheless, the jury is still out on whether a tablet can be considered a true PC.
According to Canalys, tablet shipments in the first quarter of 2011 were 6.4 million units and Apple had a 74 percent share. Be advised, Android tablet sales are expected to increase in the later part of 2011.
In the world of true PC’s like laptops, desktops and netbooks, HP is still the king, with 14.6 million units shipped and a 16.6 percent share. While Acer is second, with a 12.8 percent share and 11.3 million units sold last quarter. In reference to year-on-year sales, overall Acer sales saw a drop of 5.8 percent and 6.5 percent respectively. Dell was close on the heels of Acer at third with an 11.3 percent share, and sales of 10 million units and 2.8 percent growth.