Sun has made a significant step for providing users and developers better access and freedom with Java. Sun announced this week they will be open sourcing key parts of Java under the GPL. In effect most users should not see a direct impact on their Java usage, however in the long term Java will have a more widespread usage, subject to fewer problem and more readily available on different systems.

While Adobe is hard at work at version 9 of the Flash plugin for Linux, there was a critical security update that affected version 7 for Linux. It is recommended everyone update their flash plugin. Users of the macromedia.repo who have configured yum, should run: # su -c 'yum update flash-plugin'

I do not know how many people require PHP4 on Fedora Core 5. However since I find that I use it, I am providing PHP4 binary RPMs. Since I made the files available I did receive some complaints. Primarily a compile failure on x86_64 architecture and a compile failure on PPC architecture. I have no means to test PPC, however I have tested with x86_64 and had success. For x86_64 architecture, I have tested the src.

After almost 14 months, the MPlayer developers put out a new release: 1.0pre8 (I doubt 1.0 will ever happen). The official announcement was made on the mailing list on Monday. The mailing list had implied a release was pending. In the meantime, Fedora Core 4 came and went and Fedora fans are on FC5. The good news is that MPlayer properly supports GCC4.x (which FC4 and FC5 use). Anyone who has used a development build already knows these improvements.

I just downloaded Mozilla SeaMonkey to test out. For the interested, I have some instructions and commands near the end of this post. However this post is more about confusion in Mozilla’s choice of naming for their products. I don’t care to re-tell the whole story about Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox, but let me be clear that these folks have had the most abysmal track record when it comes to names.