alphadogg writes "Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues."

scharkalvin writes "Adafruit has announced a winner to their bounty for an open source driver for the MS Kinect. From the article: 'We have verified that it works and have a screenshot from another member in the hacking community (thanks qdot!) who was also able to use the code. Congrats to Hector! He's running all this on a Linux laptop (his code works with OpenGL) and doesn't even have an Xbox!'" We talked about Adafruit's bounty yesterday.

daria42 writes "It looks like Australia's largest telco, Telstra, hasn't exactly been paying attention to its responsibilities under the GNU GPL. Australian coder Angus Gratton has been investigating the company's branded T-Hub, T-Box and T-Touch products — all based on Linux, and all without any source code or GPL license attached. Naughty. However, it's not as though Telstra is the only one to blame — the goods are manufactured by Sagem, Netgem and Huawei respectively." Telstra responded quickly to Gratton's claims, saying they would work with the vendors to straighten out the licensing situation and fix any compliance issues.

An anonymous reader writes "Is Linux being held back by distributions bent on competing with Microsoft Windows? This article argues that it's a real possibility. Quoting: '... what was apparent early on during my Linux adoption was my motivation for making the switch in the first place — no longer wanting to use Windows. This is where I think the confusion begins for most new Linux adopters. As we make the switch, we must fight the inherent urge to automatically begin comparing the new desktop experience to our previous experiences with Windows. It's a completely different set of circumstances, folks. ... The fact that one platform can support a specific device while the other platform cannot (and so on) doesn't really solve the problem of getting said device working. You can see where this dysfunction of thought can become a big problem, fast."

Muad writes "Michael Kerrisk has been the maintainer of the Linux Man Pages collection (man 7) for more than five years now, and it is safe to say that he has contributed to the Linux documentation available in the online manual more than any other author before. For this reason he has been the recipient a few years back of a Linux Foundation fellowship meant to allow him to devote his full time to the furthering this endeavor. His book is entirely focused on the system interface and environment Linux (and, to some extent, any *NIX system) provides to a programmer. My most obvious choice for a comparison of the same caliber is Michael K. Johnson and Eric W. Troan's venerable Linux Application Development, the second edition of which was released in 2004 and is somewhat in need of a refresh, lamentably because it is an awesome book that belongs on any programmer's shelf. While Johnson and Troan have introduced a whole lot of programmers to the pleasure of coding to Linux's APIs, their approach is that of a nicely flowing tutorial, not necessarily complete, but unusually captivating and very suitable to academic use. Michael's book is a different kind of beast: while the older tome selects exquisite material, it is nowhere as complete as his — everything relating to the subject that I could reasonably think of is in the book, in a very thorough and maniacally complete yet enjoyably readable way — I did find one humorous exception, more on that later. Keep reading for the rest of Federico's review.

DeviceGuru writes "Roku has begun licensing its A/V media streaming set-top-box hardware and software technology to third-party device makers. Netgear, Roku's first licensee, will soon offer a Netgear-branded version of the recently size- and cost-reduced Roku XDS box through Best Buy, Fry's, and Radio Shack stores. Although Roku's licensing move follows closely on the heels Google's October rollout of the Google TV platform, the $60 to $100 Roku XD player design's low-cost, low-power, compact design, and sheer ease-of-use make it a compelling alternative to Google TV, assuming Google's platform results in prices like Logitech's $300 Revue. As a small example, the Roku player most likely uses an inexpensive, power-stingy MIPS-based NXP processor in contrast to the Revue's more power-thirsty, expensive, and spacious Atom processor."

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will move away from the traditional X.org display environment to Wayland — a more modern alternative. The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system. Shuttleworth said, 'We're confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we'll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We'll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there's no reason for them not to be there on day one either.'"

eldavojohn writes "As a gold member, China Mobile has joined The Linux Foundation putting it next to AMD, Google, HP and Cisco in the roster of the foundation's gold members. This marks the very first time a Chinese enterprise has joined The Linux Foundation. Earlier this year, we saw the first Chinese company openly participate in open source and now China Mobile, ranked 77th in the world by Fortune with over half a billion customers, has joined the foundation that fosters the growth of Linux."

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks of the past five years worth of Linux kernel releases, from the Linux 2.6.12 through Linux 2.6.37 (dev) releases. The results from these benchmarks of 26 versions show that, for the most part, new features haven't affected performance."

geek4 writes with this excerpt from eWeek Europe: "An analysis of Google Android Froyo's open source kernel has uncovered 88 critical flaws that could expose users' personal information. An analysis of the kernel used in Google's Android smartphone software has turned up 88 high-risk security flaws that could be used to expose users' personal information, security firm Coverity said in a report published on Tuesday. The results, published in the 2010 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report, are based on an analysis of the Froyo kernel used in HTC's Droid Incredible handset. ... While Android implementations vary from device to device, Coverity said the same flaws were likely to exist in other handsets as well. Coverity uncovered a total of 359 bugs, about one-quarter of which were classified as high-risk."