OpenSolaris 2009.06 is released

The latest release of the OpenSolaris Operating System is released and its version number is 2009.06. It is a powerful and complete operating environment for users, developers and deployers!

There are many improvements for the administrator and the users in this version, here are some of them:

For the Administrators here some features:

• Virtualisation: Support for setting VLAN ID for virtual network interfaces attached to a guest domain running on a Xen hypervisor has been added.
• Project Crossbow brings network virtualization and resource management to OpenSolaris 2009.06
• improvement in  the area of IP observability, allowing the developer or administrator to use common packet sniffing tools such as ethereal and snoop to view all IP traffic sent on real and virtual paths.
• OpenSolaris CIFS service now includes many new features such as host-based access control which allows a CIFS server to restrict access to specific clients by IP address, ACLs (access control lists) on shares, and client-side caching of offline files and synchronization when reconnected.
• HA Clusters

For the User it brings:

• FireFox 3.1 Beta3
• Quickly back up your user home directories with a new snapshot management feature in Time Slider
• Multimedia with Codeina and Elisa
• A new time tracking panel application has been added to help users track their time better for those involved in project work with a client.
• IPS has had a number of improvements with this release, including a significant reduction in memory use.
• The Package Manager has received a number of improvements particularly around start-up performance and the user experience of the application.
• Improved Hardware support
• And many more things

To read all changes look here. and here to  Download OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Slackware goes 64 bit

When the new release of Slackware 13 hits the market we finally can install a 64 bit version of it. The announcement was made on the website of slackware. The official x86_64 port is being maintained in-sync with the regular x86 -current branch.

Source: Slackware

Syllable 0.6.6 is released!

has released version 0.6.6 of thier Operating System.

In the words on thier site “Syllable.is becoming an easy-to-use free software operating system for the home and small office user. It is powerful, lightweight and extraordinarily fast and responsive.” Syllable is based on Linux (kernel).

Syllable 0.6.6 contains many new features, enhancements and bug fixes from
previous releases. Highlights of this release include:

 o A new web browser based on a newer version of the Webkit rendering engine.
 o Support for running virtual machines inside of Qemu
 o The usual clutch of bug fixes and enhancements.

If you are installing Syllable for the first time you should read the
Install.txt document, which is available on the Syllable installation CD
or from http://web.syllable.org/Desktop/Install.txt

ISO CD images, (VMware) emulator images, an upgrade pack and documentation are available from the download page. Extra software is available here.

Source: Pro-Linux (in german) and Syllable

XBMC 9.04 ‘Babylon’ released, ready for download

Babylon version 9.04 is released.

The major change in this version is that there is now a native Mac OS X powerPPC version.

The version is also available for  Apple TV, Mac OS X (Tiger, Leopard. Intel-x86, PowerPC), Windows (XP, Vista), Linux (Ubuntu PPA), Xbox, and a bootable Live CD/USB distribution (XBMC Live) of this free cross-platform media center software are available and are ready for download, (as usual the full source code is also available in our SVN repository under the GPL open source license).

Other improvements are:

• VDPAU (NVIDIA GPU Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding for Linux);
• updated Codecs;
• new Karaoke features;
• more Media Info Scrapers;
• improved FanArt support;
• enhancements to the XBMC Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful.

For a full list look here!

The XBMC Community Forum discussion can be found at  XBMC 9.04 ‘Babylon’ released, ready for download

Source: XMBC

Coreboot replacing the proprietary BIOS

is an Free Software project aimed at replacing the proprietary firmware in your BIOS. It performs just a little bit of hardware initialization and then executes a so-called payload.coreboot in itself is “only” minimal code for initializing a mainboard with peripherals. After the initialization is complete, it jumps to a payload.

On the 4th of May Coreboot.org released version 0.90 of thier open source BIOS flashing firmware. Coreboot has added support for every BIOS flash ROM technology present on x86 mainboards and every flash ROM chip they have spotted. 

flashrom is a utility for reading, writing, verifying and erasing flash ROM chips. It’s often used to flash BIOS/EFI/coreboot/firmware images.

Highlights of flashrom include:

• Supports parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI flash interfaces.
• Supports more than 150 flash chip families and half a dozen variants of each family.
• Flash chip package agnostic. DIP32, PLCC32, DIP8, SO8/SOIC8, TSOP32, TSOP40 and more have all been verified to work.
• Supports more than 75 different chipsets, some with multiple flash controllers.
• Features special mainboard enabling code for dozens of nonstandard mainboards.
• No physical access needed, root access is sufficient.
• No bootable floppy disk, bootable CD-ROM or other media needed.
• No keyboard or monitor needed. Simply reflash remotely via SSH.
• No instant reboot needed. Reflash your ROM in a running system, verify it, be happy. The new firmware will be present next time you boot.
• Crossflashing and hotflashing is possible as long as the flash chips are electrically and logically compatible (same protocol). Great for recovery.
• Scriptability. Reflash a whole pool of identical machines at the same time from the command line. It is recommended to check flashrom output and error codes.
• Speed. flashrom is much faster than most vendor flash tools.
• Supports Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other Unix-like OSes.

The download file: Flashrom 0.90 is available at Coreboot.org, here.

Debian is switching to EGLIBC

The Linux distribution Debian is going to switch from GLIBC to EGLIBC according to the blog of Aurelien a Debian developer.

EGLIBC is a variant of GLIBC and is source and binary compatible with GLIBC.

The EGLIBC (Embedded GNU C Library) was originally developed for embedded systems, but due to its compatiblity with GLIBC it can replace it. Many binaries in Linux distributions are dynamically linking to the GLIBC library, it reduces the size of binaries and, when a bug is fixed in the library, it is fixed for all applications. This  also means it is relatively easy to replace it with a compatible alternative such as EGLIBC that has better support.

The reasons to make this change are:  that the change promises to improve development, especially with regard to dealing with other developers, bug reports and submitted patches. In the past, the GLIBC developers have been regarded as somewhat unfriendly. Bug reports are often rejected because they were based on older version rather than the current version of a particular distribution from the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and are often closed without any explanation.

Other benefits will be the support for platforms other than x86 processors , shells other than Bash to which GLIBC is still closely integrated. Also, EGLIBC has better testing tools that run on multiple platforms and is more configurable allowing, for example, components like NIS or RPC not to be compiled into the installer.

Source:  h-online and Aurelien’s weblog

Nederlandse vertaling

A virtualbox version for FreeBsd

Alexander Eichner at SUN.com came out with a message to the FreeBSD community that there is a virtualbox version available for thier beloved Operating System.

This is an effort to make VirtualBox the “most portable platform for virtualization”.

The FreeBSD version runs, but has not yet got all possibilities the other OS version can do, the following options are working:

Working:

• Software virtualization
• The VirtualBox QT4 frontend
• Sound through OSS
• NAT networking

And these are being worked on:

• Bridged and host only networking (the required kernel drivers are missing)
• USB – Installer
• OpenGL support
• ACPI
• Host CD/DVD access
• Host serial support

Also these bugs en limitations are known (for now):

• Unloading the kernel driver panics the host
• Hardware assisted virtualization doesn’t work reliable yet
• VBoxSVC needs to be started manually
• proc needs to be mounted

You can find some screenshot at the website of virtualbox.