news.debuntu.org

Mandriva has reported its financial and operating results for the 3rd
quarter 2008. "Turnover for the quarter is 0.83 million Euros,
trading revenue is 1.04 million Euros, costs are 1.67 million Euros and the
operating loss is 0.64 million Euros. Turnover and operating results,
compared with the 3rd quarter 2007, were 29 per cent down, costs fell by 5
per cent."

Cray has announced
the availability of the Cray CX1 deskside supercomputer preloaded with
Rocks+ 5, the commercial version of the Rocks Cluster Distribution for
Linux users.

Ubuntu has updated mysql (denial of
service), firefox and xulrunner (multiple
vulnerabilities), clamav (arbitrary code
execution).

rPath has updated gnutls (man in the
middle attacks).

Mandriva has updated gnutls (man in
the middle attacks), firefox (multiple
vulnerabilities).

Debian

InfoWorld takes
a look the Novell-Microsoft deal. "Whatever the implications for
the greater Linux and open source worlds, Novell says the Microsoft deal
has been good for its Suse Linux and for IT shops that use both Suse and
Windows. Customers wanted a "bridge between Microsoft Windows and Linux,"
says Microsoft's Hauser. Customers also wanted peace of mind over potential
intellectual property disputes, since those can take products off the
market or result in additional licensing fees.

Arjan van de Ven reports that kerneloops.org has recorded oops #100,000, just shy of its first birthday. The site gathers the output of kernel oops messages, which are the crash signatures from the kernel. The intent is to find out which are the most common in order to find and fix the underlying bugs. "Other than the top 2 items, which have patches, we've done a pretty good job of fixing
the high occurence bugs (excluding the binary drivers which we obviously cannot fix)" Click below for his full report.

The folks over at One Laptop Per Child News have information on this year's edition of the Give One Get One program. For $399, one can get an XO for some lucky child as well as donate one to a child in the developing world. This year, Amazon is handling the fulfillment which will hopefully alleviate many of the problems seen last year. Interested people should visit Amazon's XO site.

CentOS has updated firefox (multiple
vulnerabilities).

Gentoo has updated php (multiple
vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated clamav
(arbitrary code execution).

Red Hat has updated libxml2
(multiple vulnerabilities).

rPath has updated enscript (multiple
vulnerabilities).

Adobe has released an alpha version of a 64-bit Flash player 10 for Linux, ahead of either Windows or OS X versions. Users of 64-bit systems have had to deal with various workarounds for Flash support, so this is welcome news for some. More info can be found in the FAQ. (Thanks to Adam Gundy.)

pcc, the portable C compiler, has teamed up with the BSD Fund to try to attract donations to fund the completion of a "usable" 1.0 release. The BSD folks have long been dissatisfied with GCC, but Linux developers have eyed pcc (and others) as well. LWN looked at pcc a little over a year ago. (Thanks to Brian Plummer).

On November 12, the OpenMoko project announced that all of its system images had
been removed from the download server. When users asked about what was
going on, the answer that came back was:
"The short story is that we are in a protracted battle with some
patent trolls. Google for Sisvel. In order to get ourselves in a stronger
position, we want to make sure no copies/instances/whatever of
patent-infested technologies like MP2 and MP3 exist on our servers.