Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Big news, everybody... Issue 15 has been released! If you haven’t already got it, come and download... it’s packed full of interesting articles! Furthermore, the winners of the blogging competition have been notified and are now blogging with us. This is fantastic news, and combined with the other new bloggers we have recently aquired, we now have an army of talent writing for us all the time. So keep your eyes out for the new names on the front page, and enjoy what they have to say!

Operating system security revolves around controlling access. Linux distributions subscribe to the Discretionary Access Control (DAC) mechanism that lets resource owners decide who gets to access the resource and how. People soon realized that DAC is not an ideal solution, as it gives applications the same privileges of the user running them. One compromised application running as root effectively compromises the full system. This led security experts to develop Mandatory Access Control (MAC), which grants access to resources as defined by a security policy, regardless of the user running the application. The Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) project is the first mainstream implementation of MAC.

Big graphs are not the only way to visualize data in a text document. Using a couple of tricks, you can spice up your OpenOffice.org Writer documents with sparklines -- word-sized graphs embedded into text. Developed by infographic guru Edward Tufte, sparklines provide a simple yet effective way of visualizing data directly in the text body of the document.

Derek Keats, IT chief at the University of the Western Cape, has posted a letter which reviews his stance on Novell following the CITI FOSS Forum last week. He has withdrawn his threat to rid the university of Novell products, yet he maintains his stance that Novell had "crossed the line".

This thoughtful essay by Dr. Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's director of open source, explores Nokia's experience developing a commercial software environment based two-thirds on open-source software. Jaaksi lists a few challenges, but concludes that tapping into open-source components and the developer community saves time and resources.

Version 1.0.5 of rPath Linux has been released and is available for download, project team member Michael K. Johnson announced last week. The new version of the Xen-oriented distribution features a 2.6.17.14 kernel along with the GNOME desktop environment.

Hewlett-Packard is eyeing additional markets for a new Linux-enabled remote blade workstation solution, already in use at Lloyds TSB and several other big financial trading firms. Jacqueline Emigh gets the low-down on a groundbreaking product line HP is introducing in the financial sector.

Fedora Weekly News Issue 70

First impressions are important, and openSUSE 10.2 made a strong enough impression with me that I may be making openSUSE 10.2 my new desktop OS. I installed openSUSE 10.2 RC1 soon after its release in late November, and I've been kicking the tires on the final release since it was made public last Thursday. Here's my report.

After the recent announcement by BitTorrent Inc that it has acquired the popular, lightweight Windows torrent client, µTorrent, there has been much speculation about the company making the source code of µTorrent public.

Mozilla today hit an early milestone on the road to the next version of its open-source browser, but the final product is still a year away, developers say. The Mozilla team released its first alpha release of Firefox 3.0 today, giving Firefox and Web application developers an early look at the next-generation browser. This release is not intended for regular users, not even those who like to play around with early versions of a product, Mozilla said.

Created in Partnership with the Open Source Community, OpenSUSE 10.2 Provides Everything a User Needs to Get Started with Linux

[Remember, OpenSuSE is not Novell - Scott]

Volante Technologies, provider of platform-independent data management and messaging solutions for the financial services industry, announced a partnership with MuleSource, the official support and services organization backing Mule.

Ryzom is a multi-player online game operated by a company called Nevrax. It has a dedicated following, but has never reached anything close to the level of popularity seen by some of its competitors. In fact, it has not reached a sufficient level of popularity [Ryzom] to keep Nevrax alive; that company has found its way into French bankruptcy court. The future of this game is currently in doubt.

I had the pleasure of attending a forum the other day hosted by OASIS which is the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a non-profit consortium focussed on developing e-business standards.

Hovsepian was Novell's head honcho for only a few months when he inked a $442 million deal in November with Microsoft that covers Windows and Linux product integration, patent protection, and marketing. A short time after, all hell broke loose. First, the open source community accused Novell of selling its soul to the devil. Then Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer fanned the flames by saying that Linux uses Microsoft intellectual property and that Novell's Suse is the only Linux distribution with patent protection from Microsoft. It was widely interpreted as a shot across the bow of non-Novell Linux users everywhere.

Free software is about to get freer. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites.

Other Linux companies should do similar deals with Microsoft, Novell head tells FOSS community. "We're on your side."

User Level: Beginner to intermediate Recent versions of most Linux distributions support non-English languages out of the box by using the Unicode standard. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that I was able to read and write in Greek -- my native language -- on a fresh Ubuntu Edgy Eft installation without any manual intervention. Unfortunately, my happiness lasted only until I tried to open files with Greek file names. Instead of Greek characters I saw garbage.

Voting for the first ever SA e-commerce Awards has begun. An extensive nomination process resulted in a shortlist of SA's top websites across the 19 categories. Open to all, votes will be accepted until the end of December.