Newsletter December 2008

We are pleased to announce that Linalis will be moving into our new offices in February 2009. Due to our recent growth and our expansion plans we have out grown our current offices and are happy to be able to offer our employees larger and newly refurbished offices nearby Meyrin.

In addition we have also arranged some excellent training facilities in the center of Geneva which allows for easy access to our trainees both from within the Geneva area and for those traveling to Geneva, in the IT training center of Satom.

Our telephone numbers will remain the same and we will inform you of our new address once we have moved. In the meantime, please continue to use our current address for correspondence.

To celebrate our move, we would like to invite you for an apero in our new offices on 26th February 2009. To register your interest, please send an e-mail to events@linalis.com.

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In addition to us moving offices, several things happened this month.

As you may have seen, we set up the 2009 training courses planning. You can consult it and subscribe athttp://www.linalis.com/index.php/en/Formations/Planning. Among the new training courses, we'll hold our first Pentaho sessionwith online courses as soon as January.

As a Pentaho certified system integrator, we are pleased to announce that three of our engineers have passed the Pentaho Consultant Certification Exam. We are more than ever able to offer you the best out of Pentaho.

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A new service from eZ Systems: eZ Publish SaaS

For organizations that wish to use eZ Publish without bothering to handle installation, hosting and maintenance, the Open Source CMS is now available on-demand, following the Software As A Service (SaaS) scheme. It will allow organizations which need no advanced customization or integration of the program to benefit from a low-cost standardized offer, while keeping the ability to adapt its installation and to get direct support from eZ Systems.

(Source: ez.no)

eXo Portal 2.5

eXo Portal 2.5 is available, with complete Google Gadgets support (display and customization). Among the other features, there are RTL languages support (and Arabic translation), the switch to eXo Social for widgets, Portal and WebOS that are now separate products, and various improvements concerning look and feel and ease of use.

Let's also notice new test version of eXo WCM (Web Content Management) and eXo Social.

(Source : blog.exoplatform.org)

OpenSuse 11.1

This December, 18th was the day the new version of Novell's community Linux distribution was out. This is mostly an incremental update over OpenSuse 11.0. Among the new features:

• Linux 2.6.27
• Gnome 2.24, KDE 4.1, KDE 3.5
• Python 2.6 and Python 3.0
• OpenOffice 3.0
• a less restrictive license for the distribution, in order to answer the critics from the community
• a first introduction of SELinux
• a better support of IPv6
• improvements for clustering

(Source: opensuse.org)

Beware of MySQL 5.1

Announced on November, 27th, MySQL is the first release following the acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun Microsystems. Unhappily, MySQL's founder himslef warns users against the great amount of bugs in MySQL 5.1's new functionalities, and advice against using it in production without testing it first if one wants to use the new functionalities, notably partitioning and replication.

Bad management of the development cycle for this version is incrimined, which has led to a too short testing period and too few feedback from the community.

Mainframe class support for Red Hat

Red Hat has just set up a new support contract, called Advanced Mission-Critical Program and aimed at customers having criticial services running on Red Hat Linux. The offer includes:

• more stability for all versions, including minor ones ; the latter being supported for 5 years
• major version supported during 10 years (instead of 7 as it is now)
• a response time below 1/2 hour for the most severe problems
• a documented fix delivered under 24 hours
• more communication with the client and the OEM as soon as a problem is detected

This offer comes up to par with the ones from proprietary UNIX, which are still very present on mainframe systems.

(Source: redhat.com)

See the services we provide related to Red Hat

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News from Mandriva

Mandriva's tribulations are going on : to face its financial situation, the company gets a new CEO, Hervé Yahi, who has already saved companies from bankrupcy. One of his first decisions was to refocus the activities towards businesses. Consequently, some external employees making the link with the community were laid off, what wasn't welcomed by the community. In parallel, Mandriva Enterprise Server 5 is announced for the first quarter of 2009. Yet, the community isn't abandoned since in January there will be the launch of a world wide Mandriva Community Steering Committee, were all countires will be represented.

Office 2007 to support ODF

Microsoft announces that Office 2007 SP2 will support the standardized ODF format, used by OpenOffice.org. Not only they are integrating the format, but they will also publish the way they implemented it, even on the parts of the specification that are subject to interpretation, in order to prevent incompatibilities.

Adobe AIR and Flash Player 64 bits for Linux

Although Linux has long been ill considered by Adobe, getting new versions of the Flash plugin very late, it is now the first platform where a preversion of the 64 bits Flash plugin is available. It is only at an alpha stage for the moment, but it should increase the adoption of 64 bits OSes. A few days later this is the final release of AIR for Linux which is available, giving it the same functionalities than the Windows or Mac OS plugins.

JavFX is here

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are all the rage these days, and Sun launches a new competitor : JavaFX. Matching similar products from Adobe or Microsoft, Sun is counting on the large amount of platforms already running Java and the number of developers already familiar with this environment. Moreover, the JavaFX development environment is free, whereas Flex or Silverlight ones aren't.

Google Chrome 1.0

Speaking of web applications, Google Chrome is a browser to run them optimally, thanks to, notably, the speed of its Javascript engine. Gaining 10 millions users in 3 months, Google Chrome announces a 1.0 release with more stabilitiy, more speed, and promises to set up shortly an extensions repository.

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 beta 1

Here is the first beta of Thunderbird 3, Mozilla foundation's messaging client. Some of its main functionalities are a tabbed interface, a more powerful searching tool, more integration with the OS, and overall a better integration with Lightning, the calendar module.

VirtualBox 2.1

Sun delivers a new major release of VirtualBox, which is now supporting hardware virtualisation under Mac OS X, 64 bits virtual machines on 32 bits hosts, 3D acceleration with OpenGL, VMWare file formats completely, and implementing a new networking interface which is much easier to configure and is improving performances.

Acquia Drupal 1.1.0

For Drupal aficionados, the company Acquia just released Acquia Drupal 1.1.0, which packs Drupal with a selection or the most stable and useful modules to quickly create websites. This a good news for newcomers that could have some trouble choosing the right ones among the huge amount of modules.

Spip 2.0

The SPIP CMS, which is widely used on newspapers and administrative websites, gets its 2.0 version number. Features include a databases abstraction layer, more customizable templates, AJAX support, and a better handling of plugins. As of this version, SPIP can be used as a CMS, but also as a multi SQL servers development framework.

Python 3.0

We were talking about it last month, and now it is released. The Python 3 programming language is a major evolution which is not backward-compatible with version 2 of the language (although they do their best to make the transition as smooth as possible). This new version brings a language cleanup and some welcomed improvements and syntax changes for more consistency. The biggest change is undoubtly the complete migration to Unicode in all aspects of the language, whcih was awaited by developers all over the world.

Slackware 12.2

As usual, Slackware 12.2 was announced in a discrete way. The more stable of all Linux distributions brings software updates, KDE 4, an automated package manager, and tools to help managing WiFi connections or system hibernation. The Gnome desktop environment is still missing.

OpenSolaris 11.1

There was also a new release of OpenSolaris, including not only Gnome 2.24 and OpenOffice 3, but innovations to diffrentiate it from Linux, like Time Slider, based on the ZFS file system, which brings a graphic interface integrated to the file browser allowing to revert back to any previous version of any file into seconds. Let's notice Distribution Constructor too, a tool to make it easier to create derivative distributions.

Fedora 10

The 10th release of Red Hat's communautary distribution is available! Leading edge as usual, it experiments a completely graphic boot process, the EXT4 file system, OpenOffice 3.0, LXDE and Sugar desktop environments for less powerful machines, and PulseAudio to handle sound.

Yo Frankie! The game

In time for Christmas, here is Blender Foundation's first game. They already produced two 3D short movies, Elephant's Dream and Big Buck Bunny. Yo Frankie! was entirley developed with the Blender 3D suite and was used to bring numerous improvements to the parts dedicated to game creation.

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Ecofont, the ecologic font

One had to think about it... Based on an open source font (Bitstream Vera Sans), Ecofont comes from the Nethelands and is aimed at the ones who want to save ink and preserve the environment. The various way of saving paper are well known, but how to do the same for the ink? Simply by punching holes into the font, to gain a maximum of space without losing in readability. Ecofont would use 20% less ink than a standard font.

(Source: ecofont.eu)

Windows below 90%

The month of November have seen Microsoft drop the most market share since 2 years, according to Net Applications statistics. Firstly, Internet Explorer, in competition with Firefox, Chrome and Safari, went under 70% market share. Then, Windows itself went under 90%, which was the first time since more than 10 years. Growing popularity of alternative systems like Linux and over all Mac OS X, is reponsible of the situation.

(Source: cio.com)

SCO loses its trial

Former UNIX vendor SCO just lost its trial concerning Linux intellectual property. Indeed, SCO accused Linux of containing source code from UNIC SVRX, for which SCO bought the intellectual property (we can imagine the consequences such a claim could have), even if its own analysis found no trace of the offense. Threatening of going into court in order to get license fees from companies, SCO was in trial with Novell and had eventually lost after more than 5 years, no trace of UNIX SVRX source code having been found in Linux. The company owes more than 2.5 millions $ to Novell. The case created a polemic a few years ago when strong suspicions of SCO financing by Microsoft were found.

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