Open Source means that users have the freedom to see how software works, adapt it for the own needs, fix bugs and limitations and contribute back to the community.
Computerworld News notes Oracle releases security patch fixes; MySQL flaw surfaces. “Oracle has released two sets of database patches to correct flaws in previously released security patches, including on that was itself a fix to an earlier set of patches.”
Oracle is patching their patches, too.
MySQL is up to 4.1.13 to avoid a buffer overrun in the zlib library. Consider updating, especially if you’re exposing your db directly to the internet.
Slashdot posts Why I Hate the Apache Web Server. schon writes “Today’s the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation entitled ‘Why I Hate the Apache Web Server‘ [note: PDF] for anyone who has expressed frustration with the various inconsistencies and nuances of the Internet’s favourite config file. And yes, it includes a comparison to Sendmail.”
Authored by Apache contributor Rich Bowen, who collected the FAQs from the Apache IRC chat channel. Every language has these kinks, trying to remember the strange, arbitrary, mis-named and archaic commands. Anyone who has had to tweak Apache has probably run into one or more of these.
Interesting juxtaposition here. The Open Source Development Lab, a small group located in the Northwest US, posted a roadmap titled “OSDL’s Linux Initiatives.”
Nearly simultaneously, Information Week carries a 9 page story “Microsoft Lays Out Enterprise Roadmap,” where the lead paragraph reads:
Microsoft is making big promises about Longhorn and other product development, but will it deliver? We spoke with company execs about initiatives in security, server operating systems, storage, convergence and more.
OSDL is just one small group, advancing their own agenda of tools and utilities, with an obvious focus on making the platform more reliable, appealing and robust for a variety of vendors to deploy upon. Microsoft, in contrast, strikes me as withdrawing within a fortress of their own making tying together their tools ever more tightly. The Information Week interviews a number of high-placed Microsofties and each seems to have their own agenda, plans and acronyms (and titles, too!). Don’t miss the last two pages of the Information Week piece with some surprising survey results sure to delight partisans on both sides of the debate.
Slashdot notes Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.6 Released. micpp writes “Only a short time after the release of version 1.0.5, Mozilla has released version 1.0.6 of both Firefox and Thunderbird . This update fixes a bug in the browser and email program which prevented some extensions from working.”
Oops. Sometimes the cure is almost as bad as the disease. The developers jumped a bit too fast on this one, patching 1.0.4 with a buggy 1.0.5. All sorts of flap resulted, international releases were frozen, feelings were hurt, nasty things posted to forums.
Bugs patched. Get your new release.
Despite Microsoft’s attempt to, er, monopolize the security news…
Alex Feldstein posts Attention Greasemonkey Users. “There’s a serious security issue for Greasemonkey. Until I can study this in more detail, and as my use of GreaseMonkey is very minimal, I have chosen to disable it. (Via J-Walk)”
As best I’ve been able to ascertain, the problem occurs in versions before 0.34 and possibly also in the 0.4 alpha, but 0.35 is okay. The GreaseMoney add-in shows a little monkey face on the bottom of the browser. Click to toggle whether it is disabled, and only turn it on when you need it and trust the underlying page. You may also want to consider adding the NOSCRIPT add-on, which lets you specify which sites ought to be allowed to run JavaScript at all.
Slashdot carries a discussion that starts Time for a Linux Consolidation?. An anonymous reader writes “Are there too many Linux distributions currently available?” As always, with Slashdot, there’s a tradeoff between how long you want to read the answers and how much you trust their system of peer ratings. I like a threshold of 4, myself.
This is an interesting syndrome I’ve seen happen a number of times. Folks who perceive themselves to be trapped in the “One Microsoft Way” choice of operating systems, office products, PIMs and development tools long for the “freedom” of choosing other packages, ignoring the fact that they are implicitly choosing Microsoft over WordPerfect, SmartSuite, Delphi, BASIC, PostgreSQL and dozens of other choices. But when faced with the actual choice — Red Hat Enterprise or SuSE? Mandrake? Connectiva? Debian or Ubuntu? — they complain that there are “too many choices.” Utter nonsense. People chose to create yet another PIM for a reason. They may not have liked the options available, they may not have gotten along with the developers, they may wanted one specific feature or they may just have been ignorant of what was available. It’s up to the discerning consumer to figure out their optimal choice. Me, I think there’s too much shelf space devoted to high-frutose corn syrup and colored water, but bottlers seem to keep “innovating.”
Slashdot and OSNews point the The Register which in turn points to Groklaw with the newsflash: SCO Knew Linux Doesn’t Infringe – Memo. “SCO’s CEO Darl McBride was told that the Linux kernel contained no SCO copyright code six months before the company issued its first lawsuit, a memo reveals. An outside consultant Bob Swartz conducted the audit, and on August 13 2002 Caldera’s Michael Davidson reported the results.”
Slashdot points to Unsealed SCO Email Reveals Linux Code is Clean. rm69990 writes “In a recently unsealed email in the SCO vs. IBM case, it appears that an outside consultant, hired by SCO in 2002, failed to find copyright violations in the Linux Kernel. This was right around the time Darl McBride, who has before been hired by litigious companies as CEO, was hired. It appears that before SCO even began its investigation, they were hoping to find a smoking gun, not believing that Linux could possibly not contain Unix code. Apparently, they ignored the advice of this consultant.”
So, SCO’s own study couldn’t find infringing Linux code.
IBM Officially Kills OS/2. boarder8925 writes “‘Big Blue has hammered the final nails into OS/2’s coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.’ IBM has posted a migration page to help OS/2 users easily switch to Linux.” [Slashdot]
Asa Dotzler opines that Linux not ready for the desktop, surely not the first to have that opinion, but he identified four areas where he felt improvement was necessary:
1. Migration: Asa suggests that Linux install side-by-side on a Windows machine and read all the settings and preferences and set the same on the Linux side. While this sounds like a killer feature, I’ve found most people haven’t even set much beyond the defaults, and those who have are comfortable enough with the concept to customize their software again. Switching from Windows to Linux (or Mac) is also not a one-for-one match and new capabilities in the software need to be discovered, too. A “Migration Wizard” could be a killer app for the Aunt Tillies of the world, who’d like it to just work for them, but for corporate environments where much is pre-set for the user, IT should be able to script a similar though perhaps not as thorough effect.
2. Stability: by stability, Asa is referring to what Windows users call DLL Hell: the problems with library dependency conflicts between different software installs. This is a universal problem with computers, and Linux is no further along a solution than Microsoft is. The simple answer is to stay within the lines and only install the software that your distribution’s installer has to offer. That’s a pretty frustrating answer, but the major distros do supply a vast array of software these days.
3. Complexity: Asa seems to be complaining that there are too many configuration choices. Freedom to configure the software the way you want is an advantage, but the difficulty of supporting clients who have tinkered with their settings is a counterbalance. Again, this is a universal challenge: have you taken a look at many tabs in Tools|Options in Word lately? Too many choices! Unless they don’t have the one you want…
4. Comfort: “The final major issue is comfort. Linux must feel comfortable to Windows users.” I have to respectfully disagree. People can learn to adjust, and most do. Witness the radical and sometimes trivially silly differences in UI between Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000 and XP. The world didn’t end because Microsoft installed a Teletubbies background on top of a Candyland theme, and hid common options five layers down behind difficult-to-navigate cascading menus and modal dialogs. People can learn to adjust, and that needs to be factored in to the transition process, along with a patient teacher and helpful support available. To duplicate the UI that Microsoft rolled out (and which version?) may aid in muscle-memory exercises, but it doesn’t open up the minds to new possibilities. Apple argues you should “Think Different” and the effect on many switchers — the It Just Works Effect – argues they have done a better job of the Computer-Human Interaction design than Microsoft did.
The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, July 14th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough. Google map here.
This is a combined meeting with CentraLUG (of the Concord area) and will feature guest speaker Ira Krakow, discussing WINE and running Windows applications on Linux. Ira will present an overview of Wine, which enables Windows applications to run in Linux, and Winelib, which enables Windows application sources to compile and run on Linux. Ira discusses Wine and Winelib, which make it possible to run some Windows applications on Linux, and to more easily port applications that were originally written for a Windows platform.
He’ll also touch on other projects that can help an enterprise overcome its Windows dependencies, such as ReactOS (the open source port of Windows NT), MinGW (the port of GCC for Windows programs), and Mono (essentially, Wine for .NET and C#). Ira is currently co- authoring a book for Prentice-Hall, on Wine and Winelib; his co- author is Brian Vincent.