Johnny Hughes announced yesterday the launch of CentOS 4.7 for i386 and x86_64 architectures, the “Community ENTerprise Operating System”. CentOS is built from RHEL’s sources and CentOS 4.7 was born from the recompilation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 source code.
Its “updates” repository has the latest packages till September 12th. Talking about updates, probably the most important one is the fact that CentOS 4.7 comes with improved performance for the fully-virtualized guests. This is done thanks to the paravirtualized network and block device drivers.
CentOS 4.7 brings the latest edition of Firefox 3 and a technology preview of OpenOffice-2.0 in the updates repository. The possibility to install the preview alongside the OOo-1.1.5 version is given, but you can set it up alone too.
Password hashing with the SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash functions was added. The SHA hash functions were designed by NSA and these two cryptographic functions are 256 and respectively 512 bits long. Although there are no reported attacks related to the SHA-2 family (including SHA-256 and SHA-512), there is another hash function called SHA-3 that’s currently under development.
CentOS was created for users that don’t need commercial support but want a stable operating system that they can manage on their own. Full updates including hardware updates for the CentOS 4 branch will be supported until February 29, 2008. After this date, only maintenance updates will be provided till February 29, 2012.
You can find out more about this release in the official release announcement and on CentOS’s website.
On the 1st of September, Google made an official announcement about its new Open Source project code-named Google Chrome. It sent shockwaves through the tech community and a barrage of rampant speculation over the future of Mozilla Firefox broke out with talk of Google out to hunt the much-loved fox. Mozilla’s CEO, John Lilly, responded (with notable nonchalance) on his blog by saying that comeptition from Google was inevitable given the scope and ambition of the Google operation.
Along side search engines and email clients, web browsers play a vital role in daily Internet usage. The web browser is quite simply the window onto the Web. Until now Google only had an indirect foothold in this huge market through its funding relationship with Firefox. Given that Google’s main competitor Microsoft has been at the forefront of browser application technology from the early days of the Web, there is a clear sense that by building a rival browser, Google is moving ever closer to Internet monopoly. In many ways Firefox has been Google’s guinea pig, a testing ground for the viability of an open source rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google’s relationship with Mozilla may not have been this way from the start, but Google’s decision to release the Chrome source code and the fact that Chrome inherits components from Firefox point to a very calculated move.
Google states that its main approach to building Chrome was to “rethink the browser” and create “a modern platform for web pages and applications” (source). In doing so it claims to have improved speed, responsiveness and functionality across the board. Part of this meant developing new frameworks to power so-called ‘next generation’ web applications - the V8 JavaScript engine is one example of innovation in this project.
So what is Chrome really about? Is it really about technological innovation, or is it a market share strategy through Firefox emulation? And does it live up to its ambitious remit as the browser that will power the ‘next generation’ of Internet interaction? In this review, I take a candid look at the Google Chrome beta release and ask whether this new web browser lives up to the hype. What can Google do that everyone else can’t and has Google laid down the foundations for the definitive Web browser? Click here to continue reading
A while back we featured an interview with members from the Blender Creative team discussing work on their upcoming open source game Apricot. The game has been in development since February this year and the team is reaching the final stages of production. The game is now called ‘Yo Frankie’ and you can see a 6 miunte video demonstration of the main game levels here. Needless to say that once the game has been released we will follow up with an in-depth review here on Sourced.
For this blog entry, I want to shift away from Blender’s gaming exploits and focus on the other strand of Open Source entertainment they pioneer: animation films. Below are two great Open Source animation films that demonstrate the level of professionalism behind the work at Blender: Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream.Both films were released under Creative Commons licenses and the animation source files are available for download from the Blender website as is all the software that was used to create the animation. So without further ado, it’s time to see the films for yourselves. Enjoy and let us know what you thought in the comment section. Click here to continue reading
Over the past decade, Open source software (OSS) has seen a surge in popularity. The combination of high coding standards, collaborative learning and minimal costs has attracted a new generation of users and developers, passionate about creating and sharing resources.
This newfound interest has led to crossovers in the application of open source ideas to real world projects; including everything from film making to fizzy drinks. But many of these non-software open source projects are met with skepticism by OSS purists. There’s a tendency to see this practice as a dilution of the original open source movement as well as a deviation from OSS guidelines maintained by organizations like the Open Source Initiative.
Should Open Source mean software only or should its ideas extend to all areas of life and creativity? The following list of real world open source projects should give you some great food for thought!
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I’ve been dealing with a lot of security issues for friends and clients using Windows XP and Vista lately. For many of them, the best solution was for me to backup their important files, reinstall their operating systems, and set them up with tighter security so that the virus that got them in the first place hopefully wouldn’t get them again.
It’s not that my clients did anything wrong. Most swear that the last healthy, operational session on the computer consisted of some simple email checking or an instant messenger conversation. And I believe them, especially since I noticed many victims of this little surge were using Yahoo email accounts.
The plain truth is that Windows isn’t great when it comes to security. A little adage I’ve come up with is: they don’t call it ‘Windows’ because it’s a fortress. Even if you aren’t performing the classic hallmarks of insecure computing such as downloading random and questionable files or surfing illicit websites, just using Windows is itself one of the hallmarks of insecure computing. Because of that, you have to put in some work to tighten the loopholes, but even then there are pitfalls to overcome since many of the popular programs that claim to enhance security don’t actually help that much at all. Spending money on marketing is pretty much all it takes for a large company to buy itself a good reputation, which the “black hats” who write the malicious code and the “white hats” who work against them know only too well.
So what’s the solution? Well, since total security probably only exists in laboratory vacuums, the best option other than using a more secure alternative operating system is to mitigate the risks by using an informed and tested combination of software. To that end, I’ve listed some of the tools that I’ve come to prefer. There are of course other options, but these are the applications I can vouch for. Click here to continue reading
