Slashdot Mirror
IBM's Answer To Windows 7 Is Ubuntu Linux
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like IBM isn't much of a friend of Microsoft's anymore. Today IBM announced an extension of its Microsoft-Free PC effort together with Canonical Ubuntu Linux. This is the same thing that was announced a few weeks back for Africa (a program that began a year ago), and now it's available in the US. The big push is that IBM claims it will cost up to $2,000 for a business to move to Windows 7. They argue that moving to Linux is cheaper."
Successful exploitation requires that a threaded Multi-Processing Module is used and that the mod_proxy_ftp module is enabled. (...) An error in the included APR-util library can be exploited to trigger hangs in the prefork and event MPMs on Solaris.
And the second (first in order on the site) unpatched vulnerability deals strictly with a mod_ftp input validation issue. Again, I rarely even see mod_ftp even used as opposed to an entirely seperate FTP server daemon but disabling the faulty module is simple enough in environments requiring absolute security.
And input validation issues are usually patched fairly quickly anyways, I mean come on, this is 2009 and there are too many developers for the project that wouldn't let this sort of thing continue for this amount of time. Not to mention the fact that these unpatched vulnerabilities are nothing compared to the olde IIS Webdav exploit of a few years ago - too bad there wasn't a community aware of it sooner other than the underground black hats already using it to their advantage by the time it was brought to the attention of MS.
Che? Synaptic. 2 clicks.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
Please don't ever use the Wine as an example of Linux being compatible with Windows software. Because a huge majority of programs simply don't work with it, and those that do have had special coding done in Wine to make them work, and even then they are as buggy as hell.
No, Wine has a strict policy of not letting app-specific hacks into the mainline tree, if that wasn't the case things would be a mess and nothing would run. Certainly not everything works 100%, but there are many apps that run very well. For example, I played Diablo 2 on and off for several years through Wine, and having originally played it on 'doze, I can tell you it plays identically through Wine.
Also, Wine has made an enormous amount of progress in the last 4 years. It helped a lot that the Win32 API pretty much stopped dead between XP and Vista, as it gave the Wine team a huge amount of time to catch up instead of having to chase a moving target. The huge Vista backlash also helps quite a bit, Wine has only really started on D3D10 support this year or late last year, but the fact that really nothing uses D3D10 (because it doesn't work on XP) makes the lack of support largely irrelevant. There's really no point in comparing Wine 4 years ago to Wine today, so much so that it's probably not unreasonable to say that more has changed in Wine's last 4 years than the previous 12 years before that.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
You're misinformed. IBM is already jumping. You can have a Linux workstation (Open Client for Linux - for Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu, SLED) in IBM. What's more the default office suite in IBM is Lotus Symphony now. MS Office is slowly going away. BTW: I've never seen Windows Vista installed on any work PC in IBM.