red-hat posts

Filed under: OS Updates, Linux, Red Hat, Open Source

Fedora 11 released, features OpenChange MAPI link to Exchange

by Lee Mathews Jun 9th 2009

I've enjoyed using the preview releases on my MSI laptop (due in no small part to its ability to sleep and resume better than Ubuntu on my system), and at long last the big day is finally here. After being pushed back, Fedora 11 is now available to the public.

The new version ships with either Gnome 2.26.1 [torrent] or KDE 4.1.2 [torrent]. One of the biggest additions to Fedora 11 is OpenChange, which provides full MAPI connectivity to Microsoft Exchange servers. It's the first open source implementation of the MAPI protocol.

For a complete list of what's new, check out the release notes from Fedora - they're available in 40+ languages at Fedoraproject.com. The US-English overview is presented here and a list of changes for desktop users is right over here.

It's not a lab-quality demo, but you can see the Fedora 11 preview outrace Ubuntu 9.04 in the video above. It's a solid distro, and well worth downloading.

Tags: fedora-11, OSS, red-hat

Filed under: OS Updates, Linux

Red Hat to focus on enterprise market, not consumer Linux

by Brad Linder Apr 17th 2008

Once upon a time when you mentioned Linux to non-Linux users, the first thing they thought of was Red Hat. That's because the company was one of the first and most successful to get its desktop Linux onto retail shelves. But in a blog post today, the Red Hat team notes that they will not be working on a consumer version of their Linux product in the foreseeable future, instead focusing on enterprise software.

In a nutshell, the company has concluded that while Linux has come to be popular as an operating system for servers, it's hard to build a business model around Linux desktop software. If you look at the desktop OS field, Linux is starting to make mild gains on Windows and OS X, but desktop Linux users are still few and far between when compared with users of the two more dominant platforms. And most of the popular Linux desktop operating systems are not just open source, they're free as in beer.

The Fedora desktop Linux operating system is based on Red Hat and will continue to be developed. But all of Red Hat's commercial software will now be designed to compliment the company's server and middleware software.

Tags: desktop, linux, operating-systems, red-hat

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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