The H Roundup - Systemd 197, VMware and Vert.x, Compiz's future

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item.

Top News

The developers of the open source startup daemon systemd released a new version that can take on many of the tasks of the traditional cron tool and should now work on any Linux distribution without specific configuration file adjustments. A member of the WebOS Ports team has ported Open webOS to the Nexus 7 over the Christmas break.

• Systemd 197 becomes distribution-agnostic
• Open webOS ported to Nexus 7 over holiday break

A proprietary vendor has slowed down the move of NASA's content management system to an open source platform and VMware has staked a claim on the Vert.x project after its principal developer left the company for Red Hat.

• Report: NASA open source project slowed by commercial vendor
• VMware stakes IP claim on Vert.x

Sam Spilsbury, lead developer of the Compiz window manager, which forms the basis of Ubuntu's Unity desktop, has said that he sees no future porting the project from X to the new Wayland architecture. Meanwhile, Wayland's reference compositor Weston has gained the ability to run on an X server when no 3D hardware acceleration is available.

• Lead developer sees no Compiz future under Wayland
• Wayland's Weston now able to run without 3D drivers

The Debian-Sid-based Semplice Linux provides a lightweight desktop and its latest release refreshes many of the included packages. Mozilla has released Firefox 18 with a faster JavaScript engine, Lego has announced a new, Android-powered smart brick for its Mindstorms robotics kit, and the latest version of FFmpeg adds an Opus encoder and decoders for various Silicon Graphics formats.

• Semplice Linux 3.0 provides a lightweight Debian desktop
• Firefox 18 arrives with IonMonkey-powered JavaScript
• Mindstorms EV3: Lego announces new robotics kit
• FFmpeg 1.1's "Fire Flower" blooms

Featured Articles

This week, Thorsten Leemhuis explores what the problems that occur when dual booting with Windows 8 Fast Startup and Linux and sharing partitions between both.

• Linux and Windows 8: Fast Startup puts data at risk
  

Open Source Releases

New releases in the open source space this week included new versions of e(fx)clipse, the open source shooter game Sauerbraten, RavenDB, Ruby on Rails, Scripted and Chrome. Red Hat also released RHEL 5.9 which marks the end of the first support cycle of the distribution.

• e(fx)clipse leaps to 0.8.0
• New version of Cube 2: Sauerbraten open source shooter
• RavenDB 2.0 lands with better performance
• Critical vulnerability in Ruby on Rails parameter parsing
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 introduced
• Scripted editor developers enhance customisability
• Stable Chrome 24 supports MathML and closes security holes

Security Alerts

A week of alerts in the first full week of the year as critical holes are found in MoinMoin wiki, Asterisk, Ruby on Rails and Java. The first Microsoft/Adobe patch day of the year came with a host of fillers for critical holes too, Adobe warned of ColdFusion vulnerabilities and Foxit's PDF reader was found to be exploitable.

• Critical security update for MoinMoin wiki released
• Critical vulnerabilities in Asterisk
• Microsoft and Adobe close almost 40 holes
• Adobe warns of unpatched vulnerabilities in ColdFusion
• Critical vulnerability in Ruby on Rails parameter parsing
• Current Foxit Reader can execute malicious code
• Dangerous vulnerability in latest Java version

For everything The H has published in the last week, check out the last seven days of news. To keep up with The H, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow honlinenews on Twitter. You can follow The H's own tweeting on Twitter as honline.

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