Foxing the Enterprise: With 10 Firefox takes on the enterprise

Mozilla, the company behing the FOSS world beating browser Firefox, announced Wednesday that they will be releasing the ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments with Firefox 10. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform. We have worked with many organizations to ensure that the ESR balances their need for the latest security updates with the desire to have a lighter application certification burden.

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CentOS 6 is here, and so is Scientific Linux

The Community Enterprise OS Linux project announced that CentOS 6 ISOs had been released to external mirrors last weekend.

By now most folks have heard about, and probably switched to Scientific Linux, a Linux project with deeper pockets, and some would say better long term prospects, backed by the Fermi Lab @ CERN

A minus for Scientific, and a definite plus for CENTos: Scientific Linux doesn't reportedly guarantee full compatibility with the upstream OS [read Red Hat Linux], CentOS does.

The cent os project seems to have run into trouble lately.

This new release comes 242 days after Red Hat released Enterprise Linux 6.0 and 129 days after the release of @ Scientific Linux 6.0.

Remains to be seen whether CentOS 6 will gain traction in the market,or if Scientific Linux has stolen it's thunder.

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Here Meego Again: Halt the Nokia bashing for a sec folks

As has been said elsewhere, reports about the death of Meego , spawn of the coupling of the Linux based mobile Oses of Intel [Moblin] and Nokia's Maemo, have been greatly exaggerated peeps.

Today at Nokia's Connection Event in Singapore the company launched their much hinted at first Meego device, the Nokia N9, billed as the first full touch screen swipe phone. Not clear on what that means but it seems Nokia are intent on supporting and shipping out Meego devices after all.
The social networks were abuzz today with the news, with opinion split between those who thought Nokia was having Kalonzo moments [being confused, indecisive] and those who welcomed it.
Good things about the device are being heard from those who have handled it up close.
The phone, which boasts of among other features a 8 Mega pixel camera and Near Field Communications, has no front facing buttons. Instead whenever in an
application, you swipe from the edge of the screen to go back home.
Nokia also talked about a N950 tablet running Meego Harmattan, a success to brilliant Maemo running N900.

Nokia still has, much to my chagrin, plans to ship WP7 devices, a stupid move if you ask me.

How soon before we see the N9 and Meego, in Kenya? Well stayed tuned folks

From the whats-a-half-touch-screen phone department

Photo: Nokia.com

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Mageia 1 released: Fork of popular Mandriva distro announces first stable release.

From the distro-names-you-should-pronounce-carefully dept.

Mageia, began in September 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux, announced release 1.0 of the distro at around 1pm Nairobi Time Wednesday June 1st.

The new distro [yet to download it ourselves] continues in many of the traditions of Mandriva, a distro that's very popular in Kenya.
For instance Mageia which comes in 2 distinctive installation media DVD ISO and Dual-arch CD ISO and an installable live CD ISO, which
can be used to preview the
distribution and can also be used to install Mageia on your HDD uses the drakx installer. The new distro also employs the all too familiar urpmi as the default dependency resolver
used to install RPM
packages on the system as well as popular
drak tools such as
drakconf for the Mageia control center, the
drak3d tool to to configure 3D
desktop effects (e.g. Compiz)
rpmdrake and the userdrake tool for user administration.

Mageia 1 ships with Linux Kernel 2.6.38, KDE SC 4.6.3,GNOME 2.32, XFCE 4.8, LXDE, various other smaller and lightweight desktop environments such as Openbox,IceWM and
Fluxbox.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 and Calligra are included in the Mageaia repos bringing a full
suite of office applications to the distro as are Firefox 4.0.1 and Google Chromium 11.1. Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.10,
is available in the online
repositories.
Gimp 2.6.11, Inkscape 0.48.1 and Blender 2.49b are bundled with the distro for the creatively inclined.
On the VOIP front QuteCom a SIP softphone which
allows you to make free PC to PC video and voice calls, and
Ekiga,a tool to communicate with video and audio over the internet with support for both SIP and H323 protocol and is compatible.

Anjuta,Eclipse,Netbeans,
KDevelop are the IDEs of choice for the distro.


Version 4.0.6, of the
general-purpose full virtualizer VirtualBox is
available in the Mageia repositories as is WINE 1.3.20, is available
in the repositories.

The packages in Mageia exist in three
different repositories,
depending on what license each
package uses.

The Core repository made up of packages with free-open-source software, that is added by default

The Nonfree repository includes
packages that are free-of-charge
but contain closed-source
software (hence the Nonfree
name); such as nVidia and ATI
graphics cards proprietary drivers, Wi-Fi drivers that is enabled by default

The Tainted repository includes
packages under various licenses,
free and nonfree ones, that may infringe
patents and copyright laws in some
countries in such as
multimedia. Tainted media is added by default
but is completely opt-in.

Mageia is supported
by a not-for-profit organisation,
governed by a body of recognized
and elected contributors, and made
by 100+ people around the world.

Mageia ISOs are available
on the Mageia download page direct (ftp and http) and BitTorrent

Migration options from Mandriva Linux
2010.1 or 2010.2, are also available

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Say Three point Oh: Linux 3.0 is here

So after 39 major releases in the 2.6 series Linus Tovarlds finally tagged Linux 3.0.0 RC 1 in git.
Linus has contemplated moving away from the 2.6 series for a while now and had initially hinted at moving to 2.8 partly because "I[Linus] am not comfortable counting to 40 anymore " but finally settled on 3.0 to be released to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the phenomenal,erm, innovative Free OS.
Here is Linus' original announcement in full

Yay! Let the bikeshed painting
discussions about version numbering
begin (or at least re-start).
I decided to just bite the bullet, and
call the next version 3.0. It
will get released close enough to the
20-year mark, which is excuse
enough for me, although honestly,
the real reason is just that I can
no longe rcomfortably count as high
as 40.
The whole renumbering was
discussed at last years Kernel Summit,
and
there was a plan to take it up this year
too. But let's face it -
what's the point of being in charge if
you can't pick the bike shed
color without holding a referendum
on it? So I'm just going all
alpha-male, and just renumbering it.
You'll like it.
Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does
not actually extend to all the
scripts and Makefile rules, so the
kernel is fighting back, and is
calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We'll have the
usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it
into submission, and get scripts etc
cleaned up, and the final release
should be just "3.0". The -stable team
can use the third number for
their versioning.
So what are the big changes?
NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure,
we have the usual two thirds driver
changes, and a lot of random fixes,
but the point is that 3.0 is
*just* about renumbering, we are
very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a
Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no
special scary new features, nothing at
all like that. We've been doing time-
based releases for many years
now, this is in no way about features.
If you want an excuse for the
renumbering, you really should look
at the time-based one ("20 years")
instead.
So no ABI changes, no API changes,
no magical new features - just
steady plodding progress. In addition
to the driver changes (and the
bulk really is driver updates), we've
had some nice VFS cleanups,
various VM fixes, some nice initial
ARM consolidation (yay!) and in
general this is supposed to be a fairly
normal release cycle. The
merge window was a few days
shorter than usual, but if that ends up
meaning a smaller release and a nice
stable 3.0 release, that is all
good. There's absolutely no reason to
aim for the traditional ".0"
problems that so many projects have.
In fact, I think that in addition to the
shorter merge window, I'm
also considering make this one of my
"Linus is being a difficult
^&^hole" releases, where I really
want to be pretty strict about what
I pull during the stabilization window.
Part of that is that I'm going
to be traveling next week with a slow
atom laptop, so you had better
convince me I *really* want to pull
from you, because that thing
really is not the most impressive piece
of hardware ever built. It
does the "git" workflow quite well, but
let's just say that compiling
the kernel is not quite the user
experience I've gotten used to.
So be nice to me, and send me only
really important fixes. And let's
make sure we really make the next
release not just an all new shiny
number, but a good kernel too.
Ok?
Go forth and test,
Linus

from the paint-the-bikeshed department

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