Showing all newswire headlines

AP is reporting this morning that Eric Schmidt, he being CEO of the great and almighty Google, thinks it would better if Yahoo! remained independent. Nothing too self-serving there, is there?

Our colleague Joe Barr sometimes described himself as a doddering old geek. Many knew him as a Linux evangelist; others knew him from his ham radio activities. And those of us who worked with Joe knew him in all of his sometime irascible, often funny moods. Joe was always one of our favorite people, and we are devastated to report that he died at home, unexpectedly, last night.

[We lost one of our own last night. - Scott]

SliTaz is a new micro GNU/Linux live distribution designed to run from RAM (a recommended minimum of 128MB) and installable to a hard drive or USB device. The current version, SliTaz 1.0, weighs in at a light 24.8MB and provides a nice selection of applications that run on a lightweight desktop. You can store user data and settings on persistent media, and support for more than 400 additional download packages is available.

This tutorial explains how you can set up a FreeRadius server with Wifi authentication and accounting on CentOS 5. This howto should work for a newbie. Production deployment is also possible with minor tweaking. But as usual I do not guarantee anything & take no responsibilities if something goes wrong.

Recently a blog post entitled Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy has come across my feed-radar a few times. It's yet another in the long line of "Linux ain't ready yet" jeremiads and it doesn't really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why?

Its stock price is in free fall and it still faces a potential takeover led by rogue investor Carl Icahn. However, Yahoo can still fire shots across the digital bows of Google and Microsoft; it is inviting third-party developers to use its search technology so they can build their own search engines. Yahoo calls the new strategy "BOSS," which stands for Build your Own Search Service.

Bell Labs alumni Stephen Johnson tells about the creation of Yet Another Compiler Compiler (YACC), and offers some advice to programmers as well: You can't rewrite a program too many times.

Back in issue #164 of Linux Journal I reviewed a trio of Linux-compatible games from Grubby Games. Well, the developers have recently added a new game to their lineup called The Amazing Brain Train. This game follows in the footsteps of other recent "brain training" games that have appeared on console and handheld game systems over the past couple of years. Like all of Grubby Games' offerings, The Amazing Brain Train is available for the Linux, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems. When purchasing the game, their online store will attempt to detect which OS you are using and offer it up as a sugestion as the version you probably want to buy, but you are still given the option to purchase whichever OS version you would like.

Apple, through its marketing and visual design techniques, is manufacturing an illusion that merely buying an Apple makes you part of an alternative community. But the technology they use is explicitly chosen to divide people into separate digital cells, and to position Apple as sole warden. When your business depends on people paying for the privilege of being locked up, the prison better look and feel luxurious, and the bars better not be too visible.

n OpenBSD developer has discovered and fixed a bug in the software that has been traced back to an AT&T version of Unix from 1975. OpenBSD is a variant of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a widely used, open-source, Unix-like operating system. BSD's variants include OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, and it forms the basis of Apple's Mac OS X operating system.

The Foundation is a Nokia-led consortium that was recently established to grow and open source Symbian over the next two years, while incorporating Symbian-derived platforms such as Series 60 and UIQ into the main operating system. Nine new members are joining, of which three are operators: 3, América Móvil and TIM.

Using Script, Screen, Mkfifo and shell redirection to enhance user session logging and tracking.

Just a few days ago, the news appeared that there was a boxed version of Ubuntu being sold at Best Buy stores. While I, and just about everyone else, was excited, there is a reality, as a WorksWithU article pointed out, that just having the software hidden away on some shelf is highly unlikely to attract new Ubuntu users. This made me wonder if it would be a smart move for Canonical to introduce an Ubuntu PC, probably a laptop?

ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden was recently inteviewed by Georgina Prodhan, European Technology Correspondent of the Reuters news agency on issues related to the adoption of OOXML as an ISO/IEC standard. Reuters released a condensed version of the interview on 26 June. Here is the complete text of the interview.

The Novell-sponsored openSuSE project for Linux released openSuSE Build Service 1.0 on Wednesday, providing developers with access to code repositories for the openSuSE Linux distribution and making it easier for developers to contribute code. Build Service features a collaboration system for working on Linux packages or solution stacks, according to a statement from the project organizers. The new release can scale to larger projects and expands the scope of Build Service to building the entire OpenSuSE release.

Once upon a time, long ago, there was someone from a faraway country in South America doing an advanced program at MIT in Boston, where he met with the soft-shell stage of the One Laptop Per Child project. This person eventually went back to his country, started meeting and inviting locals to learn about OLPC. He kept in touch and received a couple visits of now long, long gone and forgotten OLPC employees. Eventually he called his team the "Grupo OLPC (country name)".

In this article, I attempt to catch a menu choice error quickly and redirect to a common error page template. Despite this being my preferred route I was dissatisfied with its execution. I later abandoned this code for a simpler option. Nonetheless, I think it is instructive showing you attempts that fail. Very oddly, I now think I know how this might be accomplished. However, I am limiting myself here to tested methods; I may get to it later. Until then this and the next article desmonstrates tested approaches including their misdirections.

The Government of Canada has angered those who believe that a proposed copyright law threatens the country's open source business model. Russell McOrmond, a member of the Canadian Software Innovation Alliance (CSIA), says that Bill C-61, the proposed copyright legislation unveiled by the government last month, ignores just about every recommendation made by CSIA, a coalition of open source businesses and supporters, in a white paper.

I updated the replication section of the OpenLDAP Admin guide last night to the final version discussing Push Based Replication, i.e. what slurpd does in OpenLDAP 2.3 (dropped for various reasons, but since the docs won't be available properly until 2.4.11 is out I'm posting it here.

The article contains 5 frequent tips to make working with the shell easier.