Newsletter November - December 2009

Editorial

Welcoming a new employee

We are glad to welcome Erik Boyd. Erik has worked in recruitment for 12 years, of which 8 years in San Francisco and 4 years in Europe as a recruiter and full-desk manager.

At Linalis, Erik is in charge of the development of our recruitment division. Not limited to Open Source solutions, the recruitment division is specialised in Business Intelligence (data management, ETL, datawarehouse...), middlewares, CRMs, management tools and software development.

Should you have any question about our recruitment activities please contact us by phone at +41 (0)22 348 30 15 or by email at eboyd@linalis.com.

Linalis News

Linalis becomes a Zimbra Hosted Services Provider (HSP)

We were already a Zimbra Gold Partner, we also just became a Zimbra Hosted Services Provider (HSP).

With our strong experience on the collaboration suite, we are able to offer an optimal and cost effective hosting service. If you are looking for an Open Source equivalent to Exchange without worrying about maintainance, please contact us to get a quote.

2010 training catalogue

Our training catalogue for 2010 is nearing completion. We updated and upgraded our training offer, introducing one day practical workshops and adding new Business Intelligence courses. Our LPI courses were also updated to match the new official goals.

If you are interested in receiving paper copies, please contact us. We will send you the copies by the end of the year.

Success story - Online shop and community : genevababy.com using Drupal

New in Geneva, this online shop provides all types of clothes and accessories for babies and kids. GenevaBaby needed a website quickly, not only for the shop but also to build a community, and Drupal was the best choice for this. Read more »

Partner News

Canonical

On October 29^th, Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" was released. The main new features are the addition of Ubuntu Software Center for software management (which will propose paying applications in the future, like iTunes Store), the addition of the online backup and storage service Ubuntu One, and integration of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud in Ubuntu Server, for Cloud Computing services (Amazon EC2 or private clouds).

Please note that ShipIt, their free CD shipment program, is now reserved to organisations. This service played a great role at making Ubuntu popular.

(Source: linuxfr.org)

Canonical and IBM collaborated to create IBM Client for SmartWork, an office system including Ubuntu Linux, Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes and cloud computing applications. The product is specifically targeting businesses looking to cost efficient alternatives to Windows 7.

(Source: eweek.com)

See the services we provide around Ubuntu

Red Hat

Red Hat continues to develop its virtualisation offer by releasing a new platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. It is made of an hypervisor which can be integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, and of an administration interface... which runs only under Windows! Although a Linux version is planned, it is surprising that one of the main Linux vendors releases a product which can't run on its own systems.

(Source: osnews.com)

See the services we provide around Red Hat

Drupal

If we ever needed to prove that Drupal is getting increasinly popular, we could refer to news from the last few weeks:

• White House's website just migrated to Drupal
• in its latest report,"Social Software in the workplace", Gartner puts it among visionary products
• the report "Open Source CMS market share 2009"  from CMSwire reveals its one of the most widely known and appreciated Open Source CMSes.
• it won two awards at Packt Awards, once more in the "Best PHP Open Source CMS" category, as well as the Hall of Fame awards, being ahead of Wordpress and Joomla!.
• it is one of the Webware 100 products by cnet, selected among more than 5000 products by the readers.

See our partner page on Acquia.com

Open Source News

Mandriva Linux 2010.0, OpenSuse 11.2, Fedora 12

The October - November period is traditionnally rich in new releases for Linux distributions. In addition to Ubuntu, there was:

• Mandriva Linux 2010.0
• OpenSuse 11.2
• Fedora 12

These new releases are mainly containing software and drivers updates, which is a sign that desktop Linux distributions are now quite mature.

Chrome OS : the OS by Google

After Google Chome - the browser, Google unveiled Chrome OS. Based on a Linux kernel and developed with the help of Canonical, Chrome OS has several special features: it will only be available with some computers, the user interface is very simplified, all applications are web applications, and all data is stored online. It is currently impossible to install or copy anything on the system.

If its limitations won't make it popular to advanced users, its strong security model and its simplified user interface can appeal to lesser technical users and be useful on some of these "intelligent" devices that are more and more often found in our environment. Success or not, future will tell.

(Source: osnews.com)

Oracle - Sun deal : EU objections

The European Union emitted a Stament of Objections to Oracle buying Sun Microsystems, concerned over MySQL future and the monopolistic position Oracle could gain. While waiting for the final decision, planned for January 27^th, the uncertainty around the deal has economical consequences on the two companies.

(Source: v3.co.uk)

Microsoft : .pst format to be open soon?

Outlook users know well .pst files, as it is where all their data (mails, calendars, contacts, etc) is stored.

Now, non-Microsoft software (especially open source messaging suites) will be able to fully work with this data, as the firm announced it would release the complete technical documentation of the format.

(Source: osnews.com)

100 million downloads for OpenOffice.org 3.0

On October 29th, the 3^rd release of the open source office suite reached 100 million downloads, after barely a year of existence.

(Source: ostatic.com)

5 years of Firefox

5 years ago, Internet Explorer was the web. A market share of 98% for a browser released in 2001. No more competition. Few evolutions. Firefox rebalanced the situation by winning a good share of users with its simplicity, its advanced features (who could browse without tabs nowadays?) and its huge extensions catalogue.

Since then, Microsoft was forced to start developing Internet Explorer again, Safari became the reference on Mac, Google released Google Chrome, there is innovation on the web again, and a lot of people came to know Open Source through Firefox.

(Source: osnews.com and spreadfirefox.com)

At the periphery

Flaw in SSL protocol

A major flaw was discovered in the SSL protocol. This protocol is used to secure data exchange on the web (online payments, e-banking, etc), an URL starting with https:// meaning HTTP + SSL.

The flaw allow an attacker to spook a valid user's identity without being noticed. As the flaw lies in the protocol itself and not in a particular piece of software, all SSL implementations are vulnerable. Fixes have been published, so please update your systems.

(Source: theregister.co.uk and linuxfr.org)

URLs in every alphabet

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which is in charge of domain name regulation on the web, recently approved the usage of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). In the near futur, it will be possible to register domain names containing accented letters, chinese, arab, hindi or any other kind of characters.

Beyond it being good news for users and businesses from countries that don't use latin alphabet, others fear it could lead to a new wave of phising attacks by using the similarity of some characters from one alphabet to another to fool users.

(Source: v3.co.uk)

Tips of the month

From our technical blog contrib.linalis.com

• Build a centered horizontal menu in CSS (in French)
• Benchmarks for Databases Management Systems (DBMS) (in French)

Upcoming training courses

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