Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS’s components for better security.
Google is giving Android developers more ways to create applications for the Android Market, as it has released a native development kit for Android 1.5.
Garmin-ASUS have confirmed that, following the launch of their nuvifone G60 sometime in the second half of 2009, they will switch to solely using Android and Windows Mobile in future devices. The first Android-based Garmin-ASUS device will apparently arrive at the end of the year, earlier than previously suggested.
The 2.6.30 kernel is chock full of next-gen file systems. One such example is NILFS, a new log-structured file system that dramatically improves write performance.
Landing ahead of the US for “activity” in Red Hat’s Open Source Index this year were these countries, in the following order: France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Finland, the UK, Norway, and Estonia. Also among the 75 countries surveyed by Red Hat and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Denmark took tenth place.
A recent report has revealed that France’s national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization’s workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.
Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett has actively been working on improving power management with graphics processors via the various open-source X.Org drivers. There is quite a lot of work involved, but at the FOSDEM X.Org meeting he shared an update on his progress. In particular, Matthew is trying to conserve power with the GPU, memory, outputs, and displays.
Microsoft has today released a plug-in for Firefox that allows Open XML documents to be viewed within the popular open source browser.
The software giant said that its new Open XML Document Viewer works within Firefox and can be used on Windows and Linux platforms without needing a local installation of MS Office.