09 February 2013, 12:03

The H Roundup - Munich rebuts HP and GNOME chooses JavaScript

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. This week, the City of Munich rebuts an HP "study", the Linux Foundation's bootloader gets rewritten, GNOME plans "Linux apps" and chooses JavaScript, KDE 4.10 is released, Oracle fixes many holes in Java, lots of routers are discovered to be vulnerable, and LibreOffice 4.0 is released.

Top News

This week, the City of Munich disagreed with HP's assessment of its migration of the city administration to Linux, the developers of the eudev fork say they started the project as a learning experience, and the Linux Foundation's Secure Boot bootloader underwent some significant changes.

The GNOME developers have talked about their plan for an alternative install method for Linux programs and, to this end, have decided that JavaScript will become the official language for new GNOME apps. Meanwhile, the KDE project has released the latest version of its desktop environment.

Oracle has released a large bundle of patches that address 50 vulnerabilities in Java, while D-Link has had large holes in the security of its routers exposed by security researcher Michael Messner. After finding the D-Link holes, Messner also published exploitable security problems in routers from several other companies.

News broke this week that Android 4.x is on its way to replacing Android 2.3 as the most used Android version in the wild. Speaking of Android, Kaspersky Lab discovered malware in Google's Play store that works as a vector for taking over Windows systems.

Featured Articles

Jürgen Schmidt helps readers to establish a sensible password policy that is manageable but keeps their devices secure, and Fabian Scherschel gives an overview of the new features in LibreOffice 4, which was released this week. KDE 4.10 was also released and Anika Kehrer took a look at the biggest changes in the open source desktop environment.

Open Source Releases

This week saw new releases of the Vaadin Java framework, a new open source C++ library from Google, version 1.53 of the Boost library collection, and MySQL 5.6 from Oracle. MoSQL connects MongoDB to PostgreSQL, and a major new version of LibreOffice and version 2.1 of the Play framework were also released.

On the way to the next major release of the distribution, the openSUSE developers announced the first release candidate of openSUSE 12.3.

First release candidate for openSUSE 12.3

Security Alerts

Important security alerts were issued for Java, the firmware present in several models of routers made by D-Link, Linksys and Netgear, and for Adobe's Flash Player.

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.

(fab)

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