red

Darwin" core of Mac OS X, is pulling the plug.

"OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources," project leaders said Tuesday at the site. "OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in four years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down."

There are several reasons for the shutdown: "The original notions of … Read more

Adobe has resumed work on a Linux version of its Flash Player and plans to catch the software up to its Windows and Mac OS X equivalent, version 9, the company has said.

"Yes, Adobe is actively working on the Linux version of Flash Player 9," said Emmy Huang, Flash product manager, in a May blog posting. "We expect to make a pre-release version available on Adobe Labs for early feedback and testing before the end of the year, with the full release expected in early 2007." A better performance for the Linux version is one … Read more

A Utah judge dealt the SCO Group a significant blow in June by throwing out more than 180 of the company's specific allegations of IBM programmers moving proprietary Unix code to Linux, or otherwise misbehaving. When SCO fired back last week with a filing that seeks to reverse that decision, it salted its justification with a few instances of IBM actions that SCO believes show its case.

The instances were taken from material Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells threw out of the case. SCO's claims are sometimes redacted so that crucial quotations aren't visible to those without access … Read more

SWsoft programmers are working on an open-source virtualization project called OpenVZ that would make it possible to give a single installation of Linux the appearance of being several independent copies of the operating system. But Harald Welte, the lead programmer of the netfilter/iptables firewall software used in Linux, griped last week on his blog that the software didn't support the next-generation IPv6 Internet standard.

Welte's complaint didn't fall on deaf ears. "We have listened to the community and appreciate the feedback and will implement IPv6 support in OpenVZ in a month or two," SWsoft … Read more

Microsoft is planning management software code-named Carmine to oversee virtualization tasks such as starting, stopping or moving virtual machines, Computer Reseller News reported Tuesday.

The software has only some of the features of rival VMware's VirtualCenter management software, according to an unnamed source in the story. Microsoft declined to comment.

Virtualization lets a single computer run several operating systems at once, a feature that permits greater efficiency when juggling multiple tasks. Microsoft, faced with pressure from EMC's VMware and more recently from the open-source Xen software being built into Red Hat and Novell Linux products, has begun more … Read more

Red Hat has begun a project to make drivers, the software modules that enable computers to use devices such as hard drives or network cards, less of a thorny problem in Linux.

The leading Linux company ships many drivers with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product, making them relatively easy to use and update, but things get tricky for third-party suppliers, said Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens in an interview. Red Hat hopes to change that.

"We're trying to make the installation and provision more friendly to drivers that aren't developed by Red Hat...whether proprietary or open-source,&… Read more

Programmers released version 3.0.2 of the Xen virtualization software Thursday, adding support for a hardware assist called AMD-V coming in future Advanced Micro Devices processors. The feature makes it possible to run unmodified operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, even though Xen relies heavily on Linux.

Version 3.0.2, though only an update to the major changes that came when version 3 was released in December, is nevertheless something of a milestone. It's the version that will be the basis for the virtualization software that will ship with Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server, according to … Read more

KOffice, an element of the KDE interface software widely used with Linux, now supports the OpenDocument format and uses it by default. The change comes with version 1.5, released Tuesday, project organizers said.

ODF, a standard gaining prominence as a rival to Microsoft's proprietary file formats, is the format used by the dominant open-source application suite, OpenOffice.org.

ODF is used in KWord, KSpread and KPresenter, but work remains. "Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and interoperability … Read more

BOSTON-- Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child organization to bring inexpensive computers to children around the world, wants a version of Linux that's doesn't require fast new processors or large amounts of memory. Puppy Linux would like to help.

The Linux version is 60MB in size and has been successfully run on machines with 100MHz processors and 32MB of memory, said Raffy Mananghaya, the interim chairman of the Puppy Linux Foundation. However, it's better with more than 64MB of memory and 420MB of hard disk space, he said. An Australian named Barry Kauler launched … Read more