LWN.netLWN.net is a comprehensive source of news and opinions from and about the Linux community.Test drive OpenOffice.org 3.0 (Tectonic)- July 14, 2008 Tectonic reviews the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta. "The import extension opens PDF documents in either Impress or in OpenOffice Draw. The PDF is imported and each line of text can be edited as a single entity. Importing PDFs at this point does work but there are variable results in the formatting of documents, particularly those with complex layouts. But standard documents with a linear layout work reasonably well."http://lwn.net/Articles/289975/rss Monday's security updates- July 14, 2008 CentOS has updated ruby (multiple vulnerabilities). Debian has updated mysql-dfsg (authentication bypass). Mandriva has updated openoffice.org (integer overflow) and openldap (denial of service). Red Hat has updated IBM Java 1.4.2 (multiple vulnerabilities), Sun Java 1.5.0 (more vulnerabilities), Sun Java 1.6.0 (even more vulnerabilities), ruby (multiple vulnerabilities), and and bluez-libs and bluez-utils (input validation failure).http://lwn.net/Articles/289943/rss Study: Attacks on package managers- July 14, 2008 The University of Arizona is publishing a study on security problems with package management systems. The core problem would appear to be that tools like yum and apt will happily install versions of packages with known vulnerabilities if they think that's the most recent version available. And feeding such packages to the package managers is not a big challenge: "To give an example of how easy it is for a malicious party to obtain a mirror, we ran an experiment where we created a fake...http://lwn.net/Articles/289883/rss GNOME 3.0 officially announced... and explained (ars technica)- July 14, 2008 Here's an ars technica article about the plans for a GNOME 3.0 release. "Although the GNOME development community is still strongly committed to maintaining its incremental development strategy for the desktop, the rules are different for GTK+, the underlying toolkit used to build the platform. Developers have grown increasingly frustrated with the limitations of GTK+ and have started to evaluate proposals for remedying its weaknesses and adding more modern capabilities."http://lwn.net/Articles/289871/rss KDE and GNOME to Co-locate Flagship Conferences on Gran Canaria in 2009 (KDE.News)- July 14, 2008 KDE.News reports on the decision to co-host next year's Akademy and GUADEC conferences in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands. "The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade."http://lwn.net/Articles/289687/rss The 2.6.26 kernel is out- July 13, 2008 Linus has announced the availability of the final 2.6.26 kernel release, noting that several regressions got fixed toward the end of the cycle. For those just tuning in, some of the bigger changes in 2.6.26 include PAT support in the x86 architecture, the KGDB debugger, a lot of virtualization work, and more. See the KernelNewbies 2.6.26 page for lots of details.http://lwn.net/Articles/289810/rss Stable kernel 2.6.25.11- July 13, 2008 The 2.6.25.11 stable kernel has been released. "It contains one bugfix, any user of the 2.6.25 kernel on x86-64 with untrusted local users is very STRONGLY recommended to upgrade."http://lwn.net/Articles/289805/rss Sun invalidates the Firestar patent- July 12, 2008 Mike Dillon, Sun's general counsel, has put up a weblog entry describing that company's efforts to invalidate the Firestar patent - the one Red Hat just licensed. "These things take time, but last week, we received a response from the PTO in the form of an office action rejecting all of the claims in the patent based on the prior art submitted by Sun. Obviously, we are delighted to get this validation from the PTO. Firestar has two months to overcome this rejection, but given what we presented.http://lwn.net/Articles/289747/rss In memoriam: Linux evangelist and Linux.com editor Joe Barr- July 11, 2008 Linux.com reports the death of longtime Linux author Joe Barr. "Many knew him as a Linux evangelist; others knew him from his ham radio activities. And those of us who worked with Joe knew him in all of his sometime irascible, often funny moods. Joe was always one of our favorite people, and we are devastated to report that he died at home, unexpectedly, last night."http://lwn.net/Articles/289688/rss Linux-Kongress 2008- July 11, 2008 Linux-Kongress is one of the original Linux development conferences. The 2008 edition has been announced for October 7 to 10 in Hamburg, Germany. The call for papers has gone out, with submissions due by August 4.http://lwn.net/Articles/289697/rss |