Showing all newswire headlines

The only real exchange between peers in a traditional peer-to-peer network is limited to the files being transferred. Tribler is a new P2P network that's introducing social networking concepts to facilitate better interactions between users. Using new algorithms and protocols, Tribler users will also be able to cash in on their generous uploads for faster downloads. The Tribler software is primarily developed by the researchers in the Delft University of Technology and De Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

This afternoon Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel, talked about why Intel's commitment to open-source drivers creates a difference and advantage for Intel's architecture platforms. Nothing groud-breaking or too special was presented, but we have included some of Dirk's slides from this open-source driver presentation. Intel had also mentioned that AMD's (well, referenced as a "major graphics card vendor") open-source driver efforts as "good news."

I read with interest this morning a story in ComputerWorld (more like an obituary) about how SCO said in its most recent SEC filing that there is “substantial doubt” that it will survive. In addition to the meltdown of its lawsuit against IBM, the filing cites its depleted cash position and entry into Chapter 11 as its major woes. While the Net is flush with celebration and legal analysis (and am happy that SCO did not prevail), I think my take on this is a bit more sobering in the bigger picture of our great industry.

In general installation bellow went the same way as in TardisWiki, considering Xen 3.0.3-1 Solaris domU under Debian Etch dom0 (32 bit).
However, several things happened different from described in TardisWiki.
1. Installation didn't hang all way through.
2. To preserve "bootadm update-archive -R /a" work i had to force "umount /a"

Many of you may not realize this if you are new to the Linux world, but there are other browsers out there beside Firefox. It's a powerful browser, yet with it becoming more and more popular, exploits are sure to begin turning up. Today, we will be looking at alternative browsers that are for Linux only.

GNOME 2.20 was released yesterday. Even though I use GNOME regularly, I normally don't get excited over new releases, because most seem to offer little more substance than previous versions, with most of the work being done under the hood. This time, though, GNOME has a solid list of new features and upgrades. It's worth taking a look at even if you aren't a fan of this desktop environment.

This document describes how to set up Xen on Fedora 7. Xen enables the paravirtualization of your hardware for its virtual machines if you have a CPU with Vanderpool (Intel) or Pacifica (AMD) technology. The paravirtualization provides high performance to your virtual machines. Fedora's virt-manager provides an easy to use GUI for setting up and managing your virtual machines. It does not have the extensive features like VMware Server, but the basics are in place.

The enlightenment window manager has gone from pushing the limits on graphics to a now all encompassing e environment with supporting libaraies, APIs of all sorts, and a rapidly growing feature rich window manager in e17.

Lulatech, a software development consortium, are in the process of accepting applications for an internship and training programme. Students will receive training and practical experience in a variety of IT-related fields. All software used in the course will be open source.

In the last hour, I have read two completely different articles on Windows users, why they use Windows and how Linux could prevent further piracy.

[I'm not sure how he does it but he publishes articles from both sides of the fence..on the same day. - Scott]

SUSE Security announces that SUSE Linux 10.0 will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 10.0 after November 15th 2007 will not be fixed any more for this product. Expect the last updates around November 30th 2007.

It is hardly a fluke that Ubuntu really began to attract former Windows users roughly around the same time as Windows Vista came out. Despite the number of Windows migrants who eventually floated back to Windows XP, the fact is that projects like Wubi make it really easy to slide into a Linux mindset.

Forbes writer does post-mortem on his SCO coverage: "Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one. ... I got it wrong. The nerds got it right." A nice read and, oddly, not for "I told you so" reasons. Lyons is fessing up to being suckered. Gotta like that in a journalist. Wish we saw more of it.

No matter whether you are working on an article, an academic paper, or a novel, research is a crucial part of the writing process. And as with any research, you need a place to save your notes, ideas, relevant links, and text snippets. While there are tools like Basket Note Pads and the Zotero Firefox extension, wouldn't it be nice if you could store and manage your stuff directly from within OpenOffice.org? This is not only doable, but also easy to implement using just a Base database and a macro.

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher suggested in his article, WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy, that Microsoft needs a new "anti-piracy" strategy. I not only agree that they need a new strategy, I'll even go so far as to help them craft it.

Right after the Court of First Instance announced its verdict Monday upholding the EU Commission's finding that Microsoft abused its monopoly, our own Sean Daly did an interview with the following: Georg Greve of FSFE, Jeremy Allison and Volker Lendecke of Samba, and Carlo Piana, their lawyer of record in the case. It's a delight. Here's the audio [Ogg and MP3], and we have a transcript too, thanks to the tireless Ciaran O'Riordan, who did three-quarters of it, and Sean, who did the rest.

Linux users in the United Kingdom could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft's claim that open source software infringes its patents.

When I talk to organization X (fill in your favorite health care entity, government or medical society) they never fail to utter the dreaded statement:"We are vendor neutral." followed by a dramatic long pause.

At least 80 percent of all commercial software products will include elements of open-source code by 2010, according to Mark Driver, vice president of research at Gartner. In his opening keynote at the third annual Gartner Open Source Summit here Sept. 19, titled "The Gartner Open Source Scenario for 2007: The risks and rewards for mainstream IT," Driver said the research firm believes "open source is defined by the license, period. Almost all of our customers are scrambling to create an open-source policy, as almost none of them have one as yet."

Congratulations to the successful students and their FreeBSD Project mentors for participating in another productive Google Summer of Code. This program encourages students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break with generous funding from Google. We have had a total of over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, 2006, and 2007. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, filesystems work, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We have gained many new FreeBSD committers from previous summer of code projects already, and more are in the process.