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BSDCan 2008 officially started this morning at 9AM with an opening talk by the event's organizer, Dan Langille. However, in reality the event has already been running for two days, with the FreeBSD tutorials having started on the 14'th. After arriving in Ottawa yesterday afternoon and finding my room in a 20 story University of Ottawa residence, I wandered down to the Royal Oak Pub for early registration, meeting several dozen BSD hackers from all over the world.

Linux on the desktop has yet to gain any real market presence. Despite the unrest over Microsoft Windows Vista, the companies that focus on Linux as a business have yet to deliver a go-to-market proposition that is compelling for the consumer, for the retailer, distributors, and original equipment manufacturers. Author John Terpstra continues his look at the challenges facing the desktop and server markets, with a close examination of current market dynamics.

The FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization. The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

Potential conflicts and overlap between the first update to HTML in a decade by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XHTML has been addressed by the standards body. The group, meanwhile, has also acknowledged vendors are - once again - pushing their own platform-specific technologies, this time on RIA, with the standards process unable to keep up. This poses a problem on interoperability.

As has been widely reported, the maintainers of Debian's OpenSSL packages made some errors recently that have potentially compromised the security of any sshd-equipped system used remotely by Debian users. System administrators may wish to purge authorized_key files of public keys generated since 2006 by affected client machines. Simply using a Debian-based machine to access a remote server via SSH would not be enough to put the machine at risk. However, if the user copied a public key generated on a Debian-based system to the remote server, for example to take advantage of the higher security offered by password-free logins, then the weak key could make the server susceptible to brute-force attacks, especially if the user's name is easily guessable.

Are you still begging Red Hat to offer Linux on consumer PCs? Here are five reasons why that's a terrible idea, according to The VAR Guy.

With autossh, you can monitor your SSH connections and restart them if they stop sending traffic or SSH exits abnormally. This makes autossh perfect for keeping secure port forwarding available. Some readers will be familiar with the TCPKeepAlive, ServerAliveInterval, and ServerAliveCountMax options to SSH itself. TCPKeepAlive causes TCP keepalive messages to be sent to the server, allowing SSH to detect if it can no longer contact the server. ServerAliveCountMax and ServerAliveInterval cause the SSH client to send traffic through the encrypted link to the server, and can be used both the avoid a connection being closed due to inactivity and to have the SSH client exit if traffic cannot be returned from the server for a specified amount of time.

Microsoft has announced an agreement with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that will make Windows XP available on the non-profit's low-cost laptops for third-world children. Thank goodness third world children will no longer have to struggle to learn Linux, one tongue-in-cheek commentator observes.

After months of tinkering with my Asus Eee PC, I decided on eeeXbuntu (Ubuntu with XCFE). Here's a recap of my journey so far, and where I might be heading next -- potentially with Ubuntu.

BIOSLEVEL.com looks at one of the latest USB 5.1 headsets in both Windows and Linux. Are the latest round of gaming headsets ready for Linux usage?

The Italian firm CompuMaster has introduced a compact thin client that runs Linux. The "Praim Ino" can be mounted on the back of a monitor, draws just six Watts, and comes with a variety of client software, the company says.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you pay for hardware, you should be able to make full use of it. However, DRM and content protection mechanisms are increasingly making this difficult for people.

With the OOXML debacle behind us, one might ask, "Now what?" Clearly, something (or somethings) need to be done in order to be sure that the process that gave us OOXML does not repeat itself. One answer is "Digistan." Here's what it's all about.

Australian citizens who use GNU/Linux in their businesses should be asking exactly that question of their tax authority. (However, I doubt that anyone will do so - apart from one person who has been asking the question for at least three years). It's a tale that runs over nearly three years. Australian businesses have to periodically submit activity statements to the Australian Taxation Office and most businesses use the online method. The tax office provides a client for its electronic commerce interface (ECI) which allows businesses to file activity statements over the internet. Clients exist only for Windows and the Apple Macintosh.

This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip with lighttpd on a Debian Etch system. mod_geoip looks up the IP address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting. I will show two ways to build mod_geoip - the first way is to build a new lighttpd .deb package (including mod_geoip) which is the way I recommend. This works only if you have installed the standard Debian Etch lighttpd package. If you have compiled lighttpd yourself, then the second way is for you: it shows how to build mod_geoip.so for your lighttpd version.

Though the tools for voice control and dictation in the open source world lag far behind those in the commercial arena, I decided to see how far I could get in querying a database by voice and having the computer respond verbally. Using a number of open source tools, I'm happy to report success.

In this article, Mark Rais shares a list of those essential networking commands every beginning Linux administrator needs to know.

According to good friend Robert McMillan of IDG News, Sebastian Muniz, a researcher with Core Security Technologies, has developed malicious rootkit software for Cisco’s routers, which he will release on May 22 at the EuSecWest conference in London.

"As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptible BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptible code again. This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL.

The news that Windows XP will be made available on the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop is now official. When the project began, a move such as this would have been dismissed out of hand by any of those involved. What has changed to make the OLPC just another seller of Windows laptops?