Showing all newswire headlines

In the past five years, the mettle of mobile Linux has been tested -- and it has deservedly earned a shining new reputation as a real technology of choice -- an embedded operating system and a flexible platform for truly open innovation. Linux has even gained the status of the de facto operating system for the growing Mobile Internet Device market.

In July, CodeWeavers – whose software lets Mac OS X and Linux users run Windows programs without having to Microsoft for a Windows OS license – launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009.

GreenSQL (or greensql-fw) is a firewall for MySQL databases that filters SQL injection attacks. It works as a reverse proxy, i.e., it takes the SQL queries, checks them, passes them on to the MySQL database and delivers back the result from the MySQL database. It comes with a web interface (called greensql-console) so that you can manage GreenSQL through a web browser. This guide shows how you can install GreenSQL and its web interface on a Debian Etch server.

I’ve slammed Sun, praised Sun, abandoned Sun, and returned to Sun during the company’s current business turmoil. Despite all the challenges at Sun, I still believe managed service providers will build hosted services around Sun’s MySQL database. Here’s why.

Codeweavers is giving away Crossover Professional and Crossover Games.

fdupes is a simple Command Line utility to find and list duplicate files in the specified directories. fdupes can also delete the found duplicate files if instructed. fdupes can follow Symlinks and can be instructed to ignore hardlinks. fdupes can also show the size of the duplicate files. fdupes is a simple and very efficient tool, easy to use.

The Linux Foundation recently posted a video interview with Linus Torvalds that took place at September's Linux Kernel Summit. Torvalds, the man behind the Linux kernel, and the project's chief coordinator, is always interesting to hear and the ten minute video is well worth watching.

Burning discs reliably ceased to be an area of concern for Linux a long time ago, thanks to tools such as K3b and GnomeBaker. Another tool, AcetoneISO2, aims to be the Swiss army knife at managing disc images. This utility can convert many different image formats, such as .nrg, .bin, and .img, to ISO, and can generate, compress, encrypt, extract, and mount ISO images. It can also mount Mac OS *.dmg files as images, rip DVDs to Xvid AVI files, split and merge images, and more.

This tutorial describes how to use internal effects available within Audacity – a multiplatform, open source sound editor. Equalizer, compressor, and normalization are used.

Who says you need Windows for gaming? First-person shooters, racing simulators, space exploration, card and board games, strategy and sims-- Eric Geier takes us on a tour of a tasty selection of native games for Linux.

Linux-Kongress 2008 attendees had the opportunity to hear two different sessions dedicated to organizations trying to improve the state of Linux support for embedded and mobile systems. They have similar goals, but are taking different approaches and have different levels of resources available to them. The first of these is OpenSourceEmbedded, presented by uClinux developer Jeff Dionne. He opened with a statement that, ten years ago, Linux-based embedded systems were nearly unknown. Now those systems are everywhere, with hundreds of millions of deployments. Embedded systems, he says, make up the largest installed base of Linux systems.

A simple Bash script to parse Google's PR checksum and return any pages rank from the command line! Today's entry may remind you of our older post on finding your Google index rank, but (aside from the word "rank" ;) it's a whole separate topic.

After two years of litigation, the parties involved in an Israeli law suit that centered on the validity of the GNU General Public License (GPL) have settled out of court. The result leaves the legal status of the GPL in Israel unresolved. As reported earlier on Linux.com, the case began in early 2006 when Alexander Rabinovitch, CEO of International Chess University (IchessU) approached Alexander Maryanovsky, the developer of Jin, a Java-based chess client, about writing a chess client and server for IchessU. When Maryanovsky declined, IchessU produced its own software, which Maryanovsky described as "95% my code and 5% theirs."

Canonical Ltd., the commercial backer of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, is not yet turning a profit, but founder Mark Shuttleworth said during a teleconference today that he is prepared to bankroll the company for three to five more years. "We continue to require investment, and I continue to be careful with my pennies in making those investments, but I consider this a good proposition," the billionaire technologist said. "Canonical is not cash-positive, but our offering is very attractive to those who want to pinch their pennies in the Linux space."

Having increased its commitment to open source in recent months, Facebook announced on Friday that a piece of internally created software, "Scribe", will be released back to the open source community.

The OpenMoko project recently released a much-needed update to the official software stack of the Neo FreeRunner. I've had a FreeRunner for a few months and during that time I have used it to run everything from Debian to Qtopia (now known as QT Extended), so when OpenMoko announced the OM2008.9 update I eagerly upgraded to see what it had to offer.

The Linux Foundation (LF) has posted a ten-minute video interview with kernel coordinator Linus Torvalds. Held during the Linux Foundation's recent Linux Kernel Summit, the interview reveals the Linux founder speaking out on issues ranging from kernel/userland interactions to why Linux has so many interfaces.

These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port. But check out the list of distributions UNetbootin can download and install—it's huge, and the names don't tell you much about which distro is best for on-the-go computing. Today we're detailing four no-install distributions—Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora—and helping you decide which might work for that spare thumb drive you've got lying around, or as just a part of your multi-gig monster stick. Read on for a four-way faceoff of bootable Linux systems.

...the main impression I came away with was the breadth and depth of Canonical's vision for Linux. Mr. Shuttleworth seems to see Linux as a launch pad for all kinds of useful tools and activities. Not a prefab path to riches (all that free code!), nor the biggest free candy store on the planet (free as in freeloader, mine all mine!), nor even a way to lock in the suckers and then make them pay and pay and pay, but a platform for building cool productive tools for everyone.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, October 27, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a netbook showdown, new Ubuntus and Fedoras on the horizon, Microsoft's open messaging push, IM protocols, Google and Apple fighting for homosexual rights, and Shatner vs. Takei.