OStatic

Just last Thursday, I wrote a post proclaiming my undying love for how quickly open source projects tend to right themselves when sailing the choppy waters of software vulnerabilities. This time around, a vulnerability had been spotted in Firefox, affecting 3.x releases on all platforms. The fix was scheduled for release sometime this week, in the browser's 3.0.8 version.

Firefox 3.0.8 made an early arrival, however, and was officially released Friday afternoon (at 3:45 PST). For those keeping score, this was roughly two days after one of the vulnerabilities it patches was discovered.

Late last week, Sam took a close look at the rapidly changing browser landscape. In one of the posts linked therein, Keir Thomas speculates that Firefox may well have just given up the ghost, what with an alpha version of Chrome now being available for Linux (or, at the very least, Ubuntu).

I don't think it is, nor is it going to be, quite that easy. Firefox isn't without issue -- or momentum. And Chrome for Linux? In all reality, it doesn't exist, yet. Chrome may have a number of advantages over other browsers, including Firefox, on other platforms. But if it's still too early to call this fight on Windows, declaring the superior browser on Linux is pretty much a coin toss.

Yesterday, the GNOME Project released the latest version of its desktop, GNOME 2.26. The new release incorporates the usual bug fixes and numerous accessibility and application improvements -- including updates to the GNOME Developer Platform and support for 48 languages.

Some of the notable new desktop features include updates to Evolution. The mail and groupware suite is better able to communicate with Exchange servers, as it adds support for both MAPI and SOAP protocols. The Brasero media burner, the Epiphany browser, the Orca screenreader, Empathy, and the GNOME Media Player have all seen signficant feature enhancements. The utilities for managing multiple desktops, pulse-audio, and fingerprint readers have also been updated.

Every Linux user has at least one -- a distribution that's near and dear to their hearts, even if it isn't installed on many (or any) of their machines at a given time. I've found Zenwalk, which I've talked about before, is one of those distributions. In anthropomorphic terms, it's Slackware's younger brother, a hip, handsome sibling with a strong family resemblance. Zenwalk brings the solid, stoic, server-oriented Slackware to the desktop user.

Zenwalk officially released its 6.0 version this weekend, featuring the newly released Xfce 4.6 desktop, the 2.6.28.7 kernel configured with gspca for better USB webcam support, and Netpkg enhancements.