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LXer Feature: 14-Oct-2007

I have a lot of big stories for you this week. Linus gets mad, Amsterdam's open source test is successful, Red Hat and Novell get sued with a little help from Microsoft, 12 tips for KDE users, an article on how to protect your Linux system during startup, a review of KOffice and our own Sander Marechal interviews John Hull of Dell. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

LXer Feature: 14-Oct-2007

In its second year, T-Dose, the Dutch Open Source event aimed at developers takes place in Eindhoven. Your two LXer editors went there to find out what's happening and what's new in open-source land. Todays topics include QTopia for PDA's and smartphones, open source software in the iLiad digital paper device, KDE4 application programming, the Lodel publishing tool, efficient data structures and how to overtake proprietary software without writing code.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007," began the latest FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, posted by Brad Davis. He included a summary of the recent Google Summer of Code projects noting, "lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD." Regarding the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release he noted, "the bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras' excellent summary."

The Dutch Consumers Association has called for a boycott of Windows Vista, after the software giant refused to offer free copies of Windows XP to users who are having problems with Vista. A spokesman for the Consumentenbond says that the product has many teething problems, and "is just not ready". The association claims it received over 5000 complaints about Vista. Many printers and other hardware failed to work, the association says, computers crash frequently and peripherals are very slow.

The Software Freedom Law Center will soon reveal the culmination of a year and half of steady revision and editing: a legal primer for free software projects, designed to make complex issues understandable to the layman. The primer, which will be disgorged on the Law Center’s web site on Monday, walks through issues such as the GNU public license (GPL) and how to use it correctly, copyright assignment and enforcement, and so on.

Andrew Morton posted his first -mm patchset against the recently released 2.6.23 kernel, preparing for a big merge of patches bound for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He noted: "I've been largely avoiding applying anything since rc8-mm2 in an attempt to stabilise things for the 2.6.23 merge. "But that didn't stop all the subsystem maintainers from going nuts, with the usual accuracy. We're up to a 37MB diff now, but it seems to be working a bit better."

Experience the combined power of DB2 Query Patroller and DB2 Performance Expert. To further improve data server performance, these complementary tools have been bundled together to form the Performance Optimization feature of DB2 9. The contents of this eKit will teach you how the DB2 9 Performance Optimization feature for DB2 Linux, UNIX and Windows can help improve your performance, throughput, and response times.

First I saw a note on Google news. Then on Heise. And the reference was to Groklaw. So they seem to be starting, the patent wars on Linux.

On October 11, 2005, proprietary software maker Xara announced its plans to open the source code to its flagship vector graphics package Xara Xtreme, and with the help of community developers port it to Linux. Today, two years later, the project is stagnant and on the verge of irrelevance, primarily because the company couldn't figure out how to work with the open source community.

One of our programmers had the following comment in a recent Subversion commit: “Verified to display correctly with IE6, IE7, FF Ubuntu, FF, Galeon, Konqueror”. Sigh… don’t you hate when you have to do that?

DNS server can be attacked using various techniques such as:
[a] DNS spoofing

[b] Cache poisoning

[c] Registration hijacking

One of the simplest ways to defend is limit zone transfers between nameservers by defining ACL. I see many admin allows BIND to transfer zones in bulk outside their network or organization. There is no need to do this. Remember you don't have to make an attacker's life easier. Restricting zone transfers with IP addresses in BIND DNS Server

IsoHunt is reporting that Firefox has surpassed Internet Explorer in usage on their site.

For some time now, Microsoft has been accusing the FOSS community of violating its patents. FOSS journalists have been calling their bluff for about as long. And now the patent armageddon game is on. And we could have prevented this all along.

The Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel is a security module designed to harden Linux systems through the addition of mandatory access control policies; it was covered here last August. Like SELinux, SMACK works by attaching labels to processes, files, and other system objects and implementing rules describing what kinds of access are allowed by specific combinations of labels. Unlike SELinux, though, SMACK was designed specifically for simplicity of administration.

Fail2ban is a phyton tool, that parsing the log files of your system can determine which IPs are trying to log in any service with no success, and the ban that IP for the time you configured

When Red Hat announced its upcoming Linux desktop at its annual summit in May, the company predicted the Red Hat Global Desktop would be out by September. Now, delayed a bit, the new desktop Linux will be appearing in November, company executives are saying.

xnest, is a powerful utility that lets you log in a nested X session while still logged in the original one, useful to test KDE while still logged on Gnome or any other use you may find to it.

Times are changing. Today, you should think small to really think big. To avoid the greenhouse effect, you could start thinking about devices which take less power, for instance, with the additional plus that it would save on your current bill of course. And these days, thanks to the efforts of great open source minds and a handful of clever hardware manufacturers, you can set up a complete home and small office network, together with external web hosting and a real in-house DMZ (de-militarized zone) for less than $ (or €) 1,000.-

Who says you have to give up all your Windows programs to use Linux? Not CodeWeavers, with its latest version of CrossOver Linux 6.2. With this new version of CrossOver Linux, you can run more Windows programs on Linux than ever and such Windows mainstays as Microsoft Office--from 97 to 2003--Internet Explorer 6, and Quicken run better than ever. Even programs like Adobe Photoshop are coming along. At this point, I'd recommend that only people who are interested in helping to debug Photoshop on Linux give it a try, but I can see Photoshop running well on Linux sometime soon.

Rick Ross, founder of Javalobby, a popular site among Java developers, recently wrote an article about the One Laptop Per Child project and how cool it is. Ross also noted that OLPC does not appear on Sun Microsystems 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, which outlines that company's social responsibility obligations. Ross thinks it's time to change that.