Red Hat, the Open Source leader, is proud to announce the first beta release of the upcoming 5.2 version of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Powered by the 2.6.18-84.el5 Linux kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta comes with the following improvements:

Virtualization improvements
• Hypercall interface for NUMA topology discovery;
• Optimized placement at guest start up;
• Support in libvirt;
• Physical CPU support increase to 64 CPU/system;
• Large Memory Support increased to 512 GB/system;
• Network interfaces in para-virtualized guests no longer limited to 3.

Kernel improvements
• Add NFS client support for servers with 64-bit inode numbers;
• Enable config options for IPMI panic handling;
• Add HDMI support for AMD/ATI integrated chipsets;
• Update Infiniband support to OFED v1.3;
• Eliminate erroneous PCI ROM warning messages;
• Add support to offline CPU when realtime process is running.

Cluster Improvements:
• Resource Event Scripting Language allows complex application failover capabilities;
• Plock performance improvement;
• SCSI 3 reservation fencing support for active/active and active/passive DM/MPIO (multipathing).

Networking and IPv6 Enablement:
• Improved IPv6 compliance;
• SNMP IPv6 MIB improvement;
• IKE 2 support via OpenSwan;
• DHCPv6 client and server;
• Add memory accounting in UDP.

Laptop and Desktop Enhancements:
• Suspend and Hibernate improvements;
• Evolution 2.12.3;
• Firefox 3;
• OpenOffice 2.3.0;
• Thunderbird 2.0;
• Updated graphics drivers.

Encryption and Security Enhancements:
• New kernel crypto hardware driver APIs;
• SHA-256 / SHA-512 password encryption support;
• Add RFC4303 compliant auditing support.

The following known issues are present in this beta:
• Bug 428323: yum-updatesd: local variable 'result' referenced before assignment;
• Bug 430297: ibft_iscsi when used with Intel NIC which have iBFT misconfigured crashes;
• Bug 432776: /sbin/mkinitrd: line 939: [: : integer expression expected;
• Bug 432792: %post scriplet failure when installing: freeipmi-ipmidetectd;
• Bug 432977: Error in /etc/init.d/irqbalance results in potential misconfiguration and screen garbage;
• Bug 434847: RHEL4.6 -> RHEL5.2 anaconda upgrade produces multiple errors for several gcc packages;
• Bug 435173: Traceback when performing CDROM install on iBFT enabled iSCSI system;
• Bug 435475: RFE: [Performance] yum update is too slow between minor releases;
• Bug 435978: Rescue mode networking fails to start;
• Bug 436377: LTC42893-Rhel5.2 betarc installation failed calling SIGSEGV.


From Many Source

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Have you ever been at a party and right when your favorite song comes on, somebody next to you starts singing the lyrics wrong, loud and completely aphonous? That must be unnerving, and many, many can testify that it is one of the moments you just feel like going berserk. Here’s a quick tip for everybody who’s found himself or herself in that position: the next day, send a message to the ‘singer’ containing this Firefox script that has the lyrics to most of YouTube’s music videos, along with a joke about people who should not be allowed to sing. Ever.

YouTube’s got it all, and ever since the record labels have become partners with the world’s biggest video sharing site, most of the songs are available, along with the official videos. The one thing missing and dragging hard are lyrics, but this script makes it all happen, blending everything in.

When used, the Greasemonkey script creates a container titled "Lyrics" below the clip’s description and shows the lyrics when expanded. There’s a ‘must’ involved, though, the title of the video must contain the artist and the name of the track, but that should be only natural. If the script does not find the lyrics of a song, simply change the site providing, and Ionut Alex. Chitu, who brought this forth, suggests lyrics.astraweb.com for the job.

The next time you’re all alone and feel like a superstar, jump out of the shower with your spray for a mike and work this script with YouTube. You’re definitely going to have your repertoire increase exponentially after using it a few times. Plus you’ll get to be the center of attention at the next karaoke party your company throws. Unless you’ll be booed down from the stage due to lack of vocal abilities, you’ll be a smashing hit.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Last November the YouTube co-founders announced while attending in a TeeVee conference, that their company was toying with higher resolution videos replacing the low res that currently makes up for more than three quarters of the total clips uploaded. Because of the cryptic and almost Spartan ‘leak,’ the media jumped and all sorts of estimates started floating. "Will it be HDTV? Obviously, the Google owned video sharing service must be feeling Hulu breathing heavy down its neck and decided to step up its game," was one of the trains of thought.

Arguments immediately appeared showing that no tool in the world would enhance a resolution that much, or, at any rate, better than the original file uploaded. It’d be too costly and simply not worth it. Yet. A consensus was arrived at, and it was probably the only one possible, shaped after an old saying: we’ll live and see it.

Four months after that conference and one month longer than predicted, YouTube is testing higher quality video. At the moment, the option is available for a limited number of clips and trying it out is a bit boorish in fashion. Ionut Alex. Chitu of the Google Operating System noticed that by appending &fmt=6 to the URL of a YouTube video, a new page should open and it should have the video in a higher resolution. The screenshots on the left are his exemplification of the difference, while I couldn’t find any that would be included in the limited number that have the option made available.

The regular version of 320 x 240 was modified to that of 448 x 336, and the audio encoding was upped from 22050 Hz to 44100 Hz. It’s not a big increase, but a step in the right direction. Probably once the testing phase will come to an end, a button for switching to high res will be added somewhere on the page. Note: a video with better resolution will load slower.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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For the Fedora community, the week that has just passed brought a few interesting facts. For example, the new Fedora Project Leader wants to clear the path of obstacles for new volunteers who want to step into the Fedora world.

A Fedora NPO has been founded at FOSDEM in Bruxelles, having Gerold Kassube as president, a long-time member of the Fedora Ambassador Team. Gerold Kassube announced on several Fedora mailing lists the founding of Fedora EMEA NPO, telling how the non-profit organization was created: "The idea of improving the way in which Fedora is supported started in 2006, and has been given shape and carefully prepared during the following year. On February 23rd, 2008, conform German Law and established in the German district Lörrach, 10 active members of the European Fedora Community founded a non-profit association called Fedora EMEA e.V."

Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader, congratulates Fedora EMEA e.V and adds: " In the future, possibly before the release of Fedora 10, the Board will begin accepting additional applications from groups that have reached this advanced stage of planning. We are using Fedora EMEA as a pilot to figure out a framework for enabling additional worldwide communities. We chose Fedora EMEA specifically because this group had already achieved a very high level of organization, community interest, and command of the details surrounding funding and legality in their region."

The Beta Freeze of Fedora 9 is approaching, so Jonathan Roberts started encouraging people to work on the release overview, by filling and updating it.

Jack Aboutboul posted on his blog details on the trip he took to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where he unraveled the mystery that NASA is using Fedora on its systems.

The security advisories for Fedora 7 are:
• sword-1.5.10-2.fc7
• dnssec-tools-1.3.2-1.fc7
• wyrd-1.4.3b-1.fc7
• kvm-36-8.fc7
• cups-1.2.12-9.fc7
• qemu-0.9.0-4.fc7
• horde-3.1.6-1.fc7
• turba-2.1.7-1.fc7
• imp-4.1.6-1.fc7
• dbus-1.0.2-7.fc7
• thunderbird-2.0.0.12-1.fc7
• xen-3.1.2-2.fc7
• viewvc-1.0.5-1.fc7

Now let's see those for Fedora 8:
• cups-1.3.6-2.fc8
• sword-1.5.10-2.fc8
• wyrd-1.4.3b-1.fc8
• dnssec-tools-1.3.2-1.fc8
• kvm-60-2.fc8
• qemu-0.9.0-6.fc8
• xen-3.1.2-2.fc8
• thunderbird-2.0.0.12-1.fc8
• dbus-1.1.2-9.fc8
• horde-3.1.6-1.fc8
• imp-4.1.6-1.fc8
• turba-2.1.7-1.fc8
• viewvc-1.0.5-1.fc8


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Late last week, the YouTube development team flashed before our eyes the option to virtually add a social layer to the popular video sharing site and said that the changes would come ‘soon.’ Naturally, a couple of days later when you read that there’s been an update, you have your hopes high that it be the one promised, but no such luck. The experimental personalized homepages are still in the testing, with only few people actually using it. If you should want to opt-in on the hot action, here’s a link that will get you on board.

One of the new features appearing on YouTube is Character counter for video comments, useful for when you just start typing and don’t know when to stop, or lets you know just how many words you can fit in before hitting the ‘submit’ button.

Contextual help in ‘My Account’ is the second newly-added feature, and it has to do with the new help icons that have appeared next to some of the buttons in the account page. "To see instructions and helpful information related to managing things like your channel design and videos, just hover over the '?' icons. Click the 'read more' link to go directly to the full article related to that particular feature in our Help Center," the team’s blog reads on the topic.

Those two and the possibility to opt-in for the personalized home pages are the highlights of the update. As usual, there’s some work done that doesn’t usually catch everybody’s eye, but a heavy viewer will immediately notice. The Sort by Relevance and Sort by Date options have been brought back after receiving scores of feedback from the users that demanded this to happen. Two out of the four sorting methods have been added, but when could we expect the Sort by Ratings and Sort by View Count? Probably, the next update will clear the air, but you have to demand it in a strong voice.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Slax 6.0.1 was released yesterday, as announced by Tomas Matejicek. This is an update for the recently launched (on February 12th) Slax 6. This is a modern, small and fast Slackware-based distribution, translated in 28 languages.

Here are the changes featured in Slax 6.0.1:

• bugfix: Module Manager will display correct info about slik’ed modules
• bugfix: activate refused to insert a module which was activated last time (before reboot) because of some empty mountpoints left. This is now fixed.
• bugfix: /etc/slax-version now shows correct version number
• bugfix: trash bin was not empty
• bugfix: swap partitions were not auto activated due to a bug in Linux live scripts
• bugfix: raise sound volume for ‘front’, ‘center’ and ’side’ channels too
• kdeglobals set to force konqueror to follow slik:// addresses without asking
• For a popular demand for at least a stripped version of vi in Slax, symlinked vi from busybox.
• Slax will not have vi as default, but the ‘vi’ command will call the busybox’s vi.
• workaround: because Flash plugin with konqueror hangs even after recompiling KDE 3.5.9, disabled flash plugins in konqueror.
• added madwifi wireless drivers version 0.9.4
• added memtest 2.1
• make posixovl less sceptic (use kernel cache and set relookup timeouts to 300 seconds) in order to get 2x better performance
• deleted some unneeded c++ files in the devel module to save few megabytes (actually 5)

Slax is available in two formats, as ISO and TAR archive. The first can be burnt on a CD, while the latter can be used on USB flash drives. Although this distribution has approximately 200 MB, it comes with KDE, K-Office, audio and video encoders, CD/DVD burning and ripping tools, multimedia players, a web browser, instant messenger and a lot more. Slax is translated in languages like Danish, Dutch, Galician, Greek, Croatian and many others.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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The first release candidate of Dreamlinux 3.0 was launched yesterday, sporting some minor improvements and some bugs squashed. The final release of Dreamlinux 3.0 is scheduled for March 29th.

Video card detection got more robust: if the correct driver for your card is not detected, the configurator will use a vesa driver. The Dreamlinux Installer now identifies correctly ext3 and ext2 filesystems.

Here are some more changes in Dreamlinux 3.0 RC1:

• Fixed the problem with Iceweasel add-ons.
• MadWifi drivers included.
• Laptop-Detect routine detects notebooks and starts the laptop-mode service only when a notebook is running Dreamlinux, not Desktop computers anymore.
• Fixes to the root user home to make it compliant to the normal user setup. So, no more green screens when using root.
• Several graphics setups and fixes.
• Addition of the Color-Folders feature.
• Gnome shutdown routine replaced by in-house script to prevent freezing.
• Other minor fixes.

In the final release, the following features will be added:

• DLI to add the capability to automatically partition, format and install to the entire hard disk.
• MkDistro Live Remaster updated.
• Addition of MDistro Easy Remaster.
• Kernel 2.6.24 series.
• Improved Network connection.
• Improvements in the videocards hardware detections and configuration.
• New Easy Install applications.
• Addition of new wifi drivers.
• Full set of wallpapers.
• Possible DMA bug fixes to some specific bus like jmicron and others.

About Dreamlinux:

Dreamlinux is a Brazilian Linux distribution, based on Debian, that can boot directly into XFCE or GNOME, depending on the user's preferences. It uses a totally independent architecture called Flexiboost, based on overlaid modules. It allows the co-existence of two or more different window managers, sharing the same customized appearance. The environments can share all the available applications. Dreamlinux features its own software, like DLI (Dreamlinux Installer), EasyInstall (for point-and-click package installation), MkDistro (for distribution remastering), a configuration tool for the Engage dock, a Control Panel and much more apps.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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As the weeks keep flying and nothing worthy of mentioning is happening after Yahoo! turned down Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, rumors are starting to get leaked and suppositions made. The lawsuits filed against the Sunnyvale-based company are something of lesser importance, because they are in a unsolvable situation whichever way the coin flips. Out of the seven suits, there are two accusing Yahoo! of encouraging MS to bid, and others that demand the sales as being in the shareholders’ best interest. It doesn’t matter what Yahoo! does, it will still get sued.

Google responded very quickly when Microsoft made the big announcement. In an instant, a press release was put together, deeming the bid as dangerous, and the next day, investment banker George Boutros was hired for advice. "Boutros is known in M&A circles as a briefcase slammer. […] The kind of negotiator who will do whatever it takes to make the other guy blink," Valleywag quoted Adam Lashinsky.

Two weeks’ work later, the solution presented to Google’s directors was that the Mountain View-based company should bid for just under 20 percent if Yahoo!’s stock at an inflated price. There are two theories as to why that is. The first, presented by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, is that "Google clearly wants to see the status quo continue in the search space, and would rather fight a fragmented market than a single, stronger, Microsoft/Yahoo."

The second has a lot more to do with chaos and mayhem, that would destabilize the two companies currently involved in their very own cold war right now: Microsoft shareholders are unhappy and penalized the Redmond giant severely by lowering its stock value, while Yahoo! is hit with lawsuits and has talent departing due to the vesting packages that just expired. If crazy is what Google’s after, it did a very good job. I wonder if the bid is actually made what will be to come.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Yahoo is not, even by far, the only item on Microsoft’s shopping list. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made it clear that, although he gave his blessing for the acquisition of Yahoo, a strategy cooked by Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, the Sunnyvale Internet giant wouldn't become the company's exclusive focus in its race after Google. And while Yahoo will undoubtedly shorten the distance which separates Microsoft from the incontestable leader of the search engine and online advertising markets, by a consistent share, the Redmond company continues to climb its way toward Google slowly, through its own efforts, but also via additional acquisitions.

Of course that in comparison with the $44.6 billion price tag that Microsoft stuck to Yahoo, all other take-overs seem anodyne. Case in point: YaData, a developer of tools designed to identify unique customer segments. The financial details of the acquisition have not been made public, but it is reported that Microsoft paid between $20 and $30 million.

"The purchase of YaData brings the Israeli R&D center into the field of online advertising, which is undoubtedly one of Microsoft’s most strategic fields," said Moshe Lichtman, President of the Microsoft Israel R&D Center. "This is a great example of how Israeli technology has considerable value that is contributing to our most important areas of development. In recent months, I have become familiar with YaData's top quality personnel, and I am convinced that their contribution to the Israeli R&D center and to Microsoft globally will be significant."

Microsoft's Israel R&D center in Herzliya will grow with the addition of the YaData team, and the technology will be added to the Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group. "YaData fully believes in the potential of behavioral targeting to enhance the value of online advertising for publishers, advertisers and users," said Amir Peleg, chief executive officer of YaData. "Microsoft has the resources to unlock the potential in YaData’s technology and create a truly innovative online advertising solution. We’re excited to see what the future holds."


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Opera announced that it has made Google the default search engine for its mobile browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. From now on, mobile users that work with Opera can access Google's search engine directly from the browser's start page, for a quick and easy way to get the information they need.

The new mobile collaboration between Opera and Google covers all global territories except Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (no idea why is that), and includes all of Opera's standard mobile browsers.

Opera might have chosen the G-search-engine over Yahoo (which was made the default search engine on Opera's mobile browsers a year ago) following countless complaints from consumers who were unhappy they couldn't make Google the default browser page. Moreover, Google has been the default search option on Opera's desktop browser for many years, so it's somehow natural that it now became the default for mobile browsers too.

"Google and Opera have established a valuable relationship over the years and we look forward to continued collaboration on mobile products," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "With 2008 poised to be the year the mobile Web goes mainstream, Google and Opera are extending this collaboration to give our users immediate access to the quality and convenience of Google's search results. We're excited to extend this productive relationship and we hope that the nearly 100 million people using our mobile products will agree."

Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are the most popular mobile browsers in the world, being used on more than 100 million handsets. Opera Mini users, for example, browse more than 1.7 billion pages monthly. Both Opera's mobile browsers offer advanced features, specially adjusted for cell phones, including Opera Zoom, Opera Link and Speed Dial.

While Google recently introduced a new and improved search engine for mobile phones, Yahoo doesn't seem to care too much about the mobile side of the Web. Should we say "too bad", or should we be happy that Google won another pseudo-battle with Yahoo?


Source: news.softpedia.com

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The first ever SMX Search Bowl took place last night and had teams from Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Live Search and the SEM All Star Team line up at the starting line. A fierce battle they fought, dodging trick questions prepared by Search Engine Land, but in the end the cup was all the teams wanted and everything else was just insignificant. Sort of.

Like the title says, Google won, and did that
by a landslide. At the other end of the dais was the SEM All Star Team that at one point had a negative score. 50 questions were asked, and all were more or less difficult (mostly more), and the first team that buzzed had a chance to answer. In case they got it right, points were awarded, else they were subtracted from the total.

Google's team consisted of Matt Cutts and Paul Haahr, Senior Staff Software Engineer. Microsoft's team was made up of Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager, and Natala Menezes, Product Manager at adCenter. Ask.com had Peter Linsley, Senior Product Mgr, Search Technology, and Gary Price, Director of Online Resources. The SEM team had Todd Friesen and Ian Lurie.

Here are a couple of questions, as were posted on Search Engine Land:

The Sunday Times sent a legal request for which news search engine to stop crawling its content:
a) Excite NewsTracker
b) News Index – the right answer
c) Wired Newsbot

Which search engine first sold sponsored links?
a) GoTo
b) Open Text – the right answer
c) Excite

Don’t be fooled that they have b) as a correct answer, it wasn’t that easy. Too bad the final results weren’t posted, I really would have enjoyed seeing the exact difference, as the search engines sent their best qualified people at the event. I guess it was a measure of the employees’ levels of knowledge about their own companies as well as the others’. Glad to see Google coming first, else they couldn’t really justify their dominant position on the market.


Source: softpedia.com

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