New features included in this release:
- Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager.
- Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart bookmark folders, location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
- Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, JavaScript 1.8, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
- Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 350 memory leak fixes, a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks, and reductions in the memory footprint.
This is a powerful set of improvements. Be sure to check out the full release notes before downloading because there are some new issues (especially for Linux) that may stop you being able to use it in a production environment.
The statement from Sun:
SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.
First MySQL, now Virtualbox. Sun is going open-source mad!
Let’s just hope this doesn’t mean that they’re going to going to spin out a”professional” non-free version to compete with VMWare Workstation (keeping the FOSS version crippled).
From Phoronix
Since publishing our Linux review of the AMD Phenom 9500 on the Spider platform a month ago, we have continued in our investigation of this first AMD desktop quad-core processor that has been very problematic with Ubuntu 7.10 Linux. Fortunately though this support isn’t stagnate and a better picture is painted when using the latest development builds of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel. Per reader requests, we have carried out additional benchmarks of the Phenom 9500 to compare its 32-bit and 64-bit Linux performance.
In the news aggregator we use here I saw a post before the weekend entitled: ASUS Eee PC rooted out of the box. I bookmarked it for today but honestly thought nobody else would see it and if they did, they would see how flimsy the whole thing was and not bother reposting it.
But it turns out that Rise Security, who say they were founded in 2004, yet did not purchase their domain until mid-2006 — in other words: liars or idiots, were taken extremely seriously. But why?
The article’s premise is that they can “hack” a stock Eee PC because it runs a vulnerable version of the Samba server. But I can’t see how this would ever be an issue.
Say you buy one, take it home and turn it on. Are you going to get hacked there and then? No. You don’t have your networking set up. So you turn on WiFi for the first time and connect to the internet. The Eee PC checks for updates (including a patch for Samba). Theoritically if you had somebody inside your network that knew your IP and knew it was a stock Eee PC, they could, theoretically, brute your Samba server.
What’s more likely is you download a few updates and you’re nigh-on-immediately safe.
And this “out the box” thing is nuts. Every OS disk a few months behind the latest patches is horribly insecure. That’s why we have updates people!
I’ve just read that Phoronix (the Linux hardware and games site) are going to release their benchmarking tool they use for their hardware tests.
It’s going on four years that we have been providing benchmarks under Linux at Phoronix, and through this time the process has evolved as more applications have come about that gauge Linux system performance and meet our criteria for use in hardware reviews. While our internal process is continually refined, we have received requests for creating a Linux benchmarking manifest so that interested parties are able to easily reproduce our tests for comparative purposes and know everything that’s involved. With that said, we are now working to establish the Phoronix Test Suite that will consist both of detailed documentation defining our hardware benchmarking protocols and free software that automates much of this work.
Benchmarks exist for other systems and there are even a few for Linux lurking around, but this “suite” is definitely looking at the best offering there’s going to be on Linux.
I’m a bit of a hardware nut, so I’m really looking forward to playing around and running a full benchmark on my system.
We try and stay as clear from the FUD as possible here, so you’re not going to see statements like “OMG Vista SP1 is even slower” here, like you might on other sites.
Anyway, according to tests performed by PCWorld, SP1 is a strange beast with mixed performance:
The first thing I noticed during the installation process was Windows Vista’s friendly warning that the installation might take an hour or more.
They performed several tests on several different machines to conclude:
these mixed results do show some promise–and also show that your experience with SP1 may vary depending upon the system configuration
Perhaps not the blessing people waiting on SP1 to upgrade to Vista were looking for, especially when paired with the recent news that SP1 would need new drivers for certain hardware.
Compiling applications is always annoying when you’re used to your nice binary distribution but if you want the greatest and/or latest, it’s just something you have to live with.
The problem is that plenty of installer scripts don’t have their own uninstall routines, making them twice as hard to remove as they were to install. Thankfully, there is an application called CheckInstall which, in short, replaces the final line of installing something and redirects the build process to create a proper package for your system.
This allows you to uninstall it using your every-day package manager. It’s very nice.
Read more about it at Go2Linux.org
From FOSSwire:
Vino, GNOME’s remote desktop (VNC) server, is nothing new. It has been around since GNOME 2.8, over three years ago. The only problem with it is the fact that there is slim to no security exposed in the interface. Thankfully, with the release of GNOME 2.22 in a little over a month, we can hopefully stop compulsively worrying about the state of our computers.
And about time, no? Finally Gnome (and therefore Ubuntu) users will be able to access their computer remotely without having to do a marathon securing it from each end. As nice a feature as this sounds though, I’ll be holding out for a while on actually using it until some proper security bods have had a go at defeating it.
A massively important part of getting people off Windows and onto Linux is the testing stage. LiveCDs have done a lot of the work but they don’t allow you to save changes (for long-term testing) and they require a CD burner (and a spare CD!).
This excellent tutorial from Pendrivelinux will show you how to turn a cheap USB drive into a portable operating system, all from within Windows. It just takes a few minutes and shortly after, you’re running PCLOS.
Enjoy!
I was about to do the manual update when I was pointed to this tool from Scott’s Twiiter . It’s the WordPress Automatic Updater plug-in (GPL). WAUP is an easy point-n-click way to upgrade WordPress versions. It not only upgraded my copy of WordPress but made backups first in case something went wrong. Very slick.
Not strictly Linux-orientated, but still open-source and relevant to a lot of people. Especially us.