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Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

I first heard of gOS when it was chosen to power the $199 Wal-Mart gPC. The third iteration of the OS, gOS 3.0 "Gadgets" Beta, was released last week. It's a great Web-focused desktop, but it doesn't offer much to experienced or current Ubuntu users. I downloaded the ISO image of gOS 3.0, burned it to a CD, and installed it on one of my test systems. I used a basic PC with a 1.7GHz AMD Duron processor and 512MB of RAM, to see how well gOS fared on an unimpressive machine.

This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks. The day opened with Kate Alhola from Nokia showing off the Nokia N810. As already reported, the talk was followed by handing out the devices to the audience. Her blog says she hopes to see lots of Qt and KDE applications in Maemo Garage soon.

ISO and IEC have announced the rejection of the four appeals submitted by the National Bodies of Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela, as earlier recommended by the Secretaries General of each of the two standards organizations. to their respective management boards not to give the appeals further consideration.

With DrasticGrid, you can easily put a MySQL database table or view on a Web page, complete with editing, sorting, and pagination capabilities, and support for adding and deleting records. DrasticGrid is one of three controls from DrasticData -- the others are a tag cloud and Google Maps controller, both of which also get their data from a MySQL database.

Shooting in RAW format is great for the photography buff. However, when it is time to share with others, post on your photo gallery, or print at the local photo printing shop, you want something more portable. Here we'll look at converting RAW photos (specifically Canon's CRW format) into JPEGs using a batch command-line approach in BASH.

As a computer journalist for the last 25 years, I've received a lot of review copies of software. As something of an obsessive magpie, I've tended to keep most of it, “for reference”. Until yesterday, that is, when I finally threw out all those copies of OS/2, Lotus SmartSuite, and my entire collection of Microsoft software. This included Windows NT 3.5, Windows 2000, Microsoft Office and many, many more. What's makes this little spring-cleaning exercise particularly apt as well as cathartic is that all of us - and not just me - may finally be witnessing the end of the Windows era.

Dell yesterday announced a brand new range of laptops ranging from ultra-portables to high-end desktop replacement machines. The really interesting news for Linux fans, however, was Dell’s new “Latitude ON” system which allows for almost instant-on booting when you want to check an email or something on the Internet without booting the entire operating system.

Our open source expert foresees the future of Linux: By 2012 the OS will have matured into three basic usage models. Web-based apps rule, virtualization is a breeze, and command-line hacking for basic system configuration is a thing of the past.

LXer Feature: 15-Aug-2008

In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other's shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer's built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework. Originally that was the theme of this article when I had begun thinking about writing it. The things that I saw at DefCon were every bit of the ideals I went up there to find and more...

It is common for the open source community to be called upon by vendors--including proprietary vendors--to be beta testers for Linux releases, according to an industry player. Peter Cheng, open source evangelist and founder of an open source services provider company in China, told ZDNet Asia the practice of recruiting Linux testers is common among Web 2.0 companies.

This article explains how you can install and configure apache2-mpm-itk on a Debian Etch server. apache2-mpm-itk is an MPM (Multi-Processing Module) for the Apache 2 web server. mpm-itk allows you to run each of your vhost under a separate UID and GID - in short, the scripts and configuration files for one vhost no longer have to be readable for all the other vhosts. mpm-itk works with mod_php because mpm-itk is based on the traditional prefork MPM, which means it is non-threaded. This means you do not need to use suExec or suPHP anymore to run a website's PHP scripts as a separate user.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, says he's fed up with what he sees as a "security circus" surrounding software vulnerabilities and how they're hyped by security people. Torvalds explained his position in an e-mail exchange with Network World this week. He also expanded on critical comments he made last month that caused a stir in the IT industry.

There are many cases when after looking at some of the FAQ on the web you ask yourself: “Are they for real? Who asks those questions anyway?” Questions like: “How Does Linux Kernel Versioning Work?” or “How much does Ubuntu cost?” don’t really provide you with the information you need. Mainly because they target a very specific kind of users. On the other hand there are many really helpful FAQ, some of them were used in preparing this article. I also wondered around many forums collecting questions that real people ask frequently. The target of those questions are mainly Ubuntu users, who came from a Windows world and use it for about a week or two. Here are some of my findings. I hope they will actually help someone.

A federal judge in the United States has ruled that an open source license should have the same legal enforceability as traditional copyright.

With LinuxWorld showcasing the popularity of the open source operating system, and with open source in general finding its legs in the enterprise, Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, made a slate of predictions for Linux and open source during his keynote address on Wednesday at the Black Hat conference.

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible. I've written before about how preload doesn't seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I'd sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

How not to crash your Solaris machine using savecore on an encapsulated root disk.

The computing industry is familiar with the low-cost lab known as the garage, a historic hot-bed for innovation, and this week LinuxWorld had its own "garage" to showcase embedded Linux. From a wirelessly controlled Lego robot to a device designed to aid information sharing in third-world countries, a number of small vendors and independent thinkers were on hand to showcase the possibilities inherent in embedded Linux.

ISO Master which is claimed to be the best ISO editing tool is a graphical editor for ISO images. ISO Master is useful for extracting, deleting, or adding files and directories to or from an ISO image. ISO Master can read .ISO files (ISO9660, Joliet, RockRidge, and El Torito), most .NRG files, and some single-track .MDF files and can save and only save as .ISO.