Showing all newswire headlines

Upon the announcement of government's adoption of ODF and open document standards, Tectonic spoke to Microsoft to find out how this would effect the company. Admittedly surprised by the document's release and disagreeing with certain definitions, Microsoft appeared confident that the Office Open XML format fulfilled the criteria.

See how Open Source components can be used individually or collectively to build a Grid solution, using native solutions or by taking advantage of the standardization of Grid solutions.

KACE, a systems management appliance company, announced on Nov. 19 that its new survey revealed that 90 percent of the Windows users are concerned about migrating to Vista, and that 44 percent would consider deploying Macs or Linux-based systems to avoid Vista migration.

A few days back I was exultant over the fact that I had helped a man whom I believe to be balanced in his assessment of operating systems - iTWire editor Stan Beer - and assisted him in taking his first steps on the road to experiencing the myriad benefits I've enjoyed by moving from Windows to Linux. But Stan has had far too many problems with instability on his Ubuntu system. Finally things came to the stage where the box just wouldn't get past the stage where it enters the GRUB boot menu. Hence he has had to put his Linux plans on hold. Damn!

The Free Software Foundation published the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 on Nov. 19. This new license, based on the GPLv3, enables those who use AGPLv3 software over a network to receive the source code for that software. The AGPL was created to deal with the so-called ASP (application service provider) loophole in the GPLv2. With the approval of the GPLv3, the AGPL was also incorporated, but that version was oriented toward papering over the ASP loophole. This new version makes it explicit that developers can use GPLv3 and AGPLv3 code in common projects. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to foster user and development communities around network-oriented free software.

The XSS flaw, found in the Firefox JAR URL handler, is a problem child endemic to just about anything Web 2.0. Mozilla is working to fix a flaw in the JAR URL handler that could leave Firefox users open to cross-site scripting attacks that are impossible for anti-virus programs to prevent. It turns out that the vulnerability, first reported in February by Jesse Ruderman, is far more serious than first realized. In fact, it turns out to be endemic to "almost everything that smells like Web 2.0," security researcher Petko D. Petkov, also known as "pdp" of GNUCitizen, wrote in a Nov. 7 posting.

I’m a sucker for a Linux or BSD distro with a live CD. Even if you can’t do an install directly from the disc, at least you can figure out whether the damn thing will boot and how your hardware will react when it does. One of my favorites, ZenWalk, just released Zenwalk 4.8 Live. Both Zenwalk and Vector — the top Xfce-based, Slackware-derived distributions — are very good, but I like the way Zenwalk looks and works just that much better.

I now have my new box up and running and thought I would post some benchmark results that I've run. All of the 3DMark Benchmarks were run in window mode at 1024x768x32 unless other wise stated.

Part 7 of this series shows you why Emacs is the self-documenting editor, and the many ways in which you can take advantage of the help and assistance offered in this editor. In this tutorial, learn about describing keystrokes, commands, and functions. You'll also read, browse, and search through a complete Emacs reference manual.

Rather than choose her current career, it almost seems as if Cathy Malmrose's career chose her. Malmrose is CEO of ZaReason, an OEM that manufactures and sells desktop and notebook systems with Ubuntu, where she deals with everything from talking with the US Department of Commerce concerning export issues to inspecting the hardware for quality assurance purposes.

Shuttle has begun offering British buyers a range of its XPC machines with Linux pre-installed, the small form-factor PC specialist said today. Shuttle has two XPCs on offer: the SD3002W and the SD300Q2, the former loaded with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 and the second with OpenSuSE. They're pitched, respectively, at business and home buyers.

Many organizations face a productivity problem with employees who abuse chat programs like MSN Messenger. Some IT departments are instructed to block this kind of traffic for users who either abuse or simply don't require the software. You can block applications like MSN Messenger in your proxy server, but some clients may still have access to the applications, because there are many versions of MSN Messenger in use, making blocking the application with a proxy server difficult. Instead, block MSN Messenger traffic more easily with iptables.

This guide is Debian specific but could be ported to other distributions since the concept is the same. In order to use TLS Extensions we have to patch and recompile Apache2 and recompile OpenSSL with the enable-tlsext directive. Since TLS extensions are relatively new, some Internet browsers will not work so the Apache2 server will deliver just the default site as http 1.0 does on an http 1.1 server.

Originally scheduled to be held in Hong Kong next week, Open Source Software Summit Asia has been held over to 2008, organizers confirmed.

Music fans, recording artists, journalists, the RIAA, and digital rights activists have at least one thing in common right now. I’m speaking of the intense interests some people from each group have in the outcome of Radiohead’s recent experiment in business models for musicians, of course. The point is that security is, among other things, a matter of picking your battles well. There are some things that just cannot be protected in the long run and ultimately, if your business model depends on protecting such things, either your business model will change or your business will fail. It’s really that simple.

[Not Linux related, but interesting nonetheless - Sander]

In a country with resources so limited its students have to take turns attending school, a new government program will boost those same students into the 21st Century by providing one Edubuntu-loaded computer per student. How research and planning led to one of the largest educational Linux deployments ever.

Fedora's Pirut is a useful tool for basic software installation and package searches. However, if you really want to take control of package management, you need to get back to basics with yum. Just as, on Debian systems, dpkg is the back end underlying apt-get and graphical tools such as Synaptic, so on RPM systems, yum is the hidden power behind Pirut and the Pup updater. Not only does yum have more options than Pirut, but you can enhance it with additional plugins and utilities, many of which work only with yum.

A GNU Grub guide which is specially designed for newbies and focuses on the fields as below

MBR, boot sector, boot loader
Backup & Restore boot loader
Grub stage1, stage2, stage3 and relation among them
Making Grub Floppy
Making Grub CD
Making Grub Pen drive
stage1 and stage2 on different media
Grub's device and device.map file
Grub Rescue
Super Grub Disk
Grub'S GUI configuration
Manual booting with Grub shell
Disk investigation with Grub

I used to receive around 5,000-7,000 spams daily on my email which is publicly available on the internet. It was consuming too many productive hours daily to fight spam. I decided to fight back. To reduce the spams I first made changes to my postfix configuration with the aim to stop most spams upfront. With 6 simple changes to my postfix configuration my spams dropped from 5,000 - 7,000 to a manageable 5-20 spams daily, often less. Let’s look at these 6 simple postfix changes in details to drastically reduce your spam count too. I am consistently getting over 99% spam reduction after implementing these changes. The changes proved to be safe and without false positives. In several weeks of manual browsing through the log file, I couldn’t spot a single false positive (a case where legitimate mail is rejected).

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #66 for the week November 11th - November 17th, 2007. In this issue we cover the LoCo teams up next for official approval, the welcoming of a new MOTU, some news from the good folks in Ubuntuforums, and, as always, much much more.