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A French robotics start-up called Wany Robotics has announced two mobile, mini-ITX-based sensor robots that run Linux. Aimed at educational and R&D applications, the PeKeeII robots are based on Via C3 or Intel Core 2 Duo processors, and offer sensor telemetry, ultrasound, and laser detection. Wany offers "Advanced" and "Ultimate" robots, both of which are built atop the same "Essential" PeKeeII model. Supplied without an onboard computer or OS, the Essential model is equipped with dual 12V DC motors running off of a 12V 7A/h NiMh battery. It has two odometers, 360-degree bumpers, and light and temperature sensors.

Opera Software has patched seven vulnerabilities in its flagship Opera browser, but declined to provide information about one of the bugs. The Norwegian browser developer hinted that other programs, not yet unpatched, were also affected by the flaw. Wednesday's update to Opera 9.52 fixes multiple bugs - seven in the Windows version, five in the Mac edition and six in the Linux browser - that range from "extremely severe" to "not severe" in the company's five-step threat ranking system.

Fedora has admitted Red Hat OpenSSH packages were compromised by two separate server intrusions. A week late and leaving the FOSS reputation for timely disclosure in tatters.

For this Sunday's Linux and Unix humor break, I found this dated (yet still relevant) joke on the net and, not being able to believe I found it, downloaded the page immediately. This morning, when I woke up, I checked again and the page where I found the Hacker Test actually does exist! This is important because, when you don't sleep regularly, reality may or may not be valid. Just because something happens to me in the middle of the "day" doesn't mean I'm not dreaming ;) Check out the rest of the long list of jokes and Susan Stepney's web site. It's a great collection of information. Fun, entertaining and informative. I don't know Susan personally, but I dig her site and wish her the best. At the very least, check out the jokes. There are plenty of goods ones to be found there. The world needs more educators with a sense of humor :)

The Nessus vulnerability scanner, is the world-leader in active scanners, featuring high speed discovery, configuration auditing, asset profiling, sensitive data discovery and vulnerability analysis of your security posture. Nessus scanners can be distributed throughout an entire enterprise, inside DMZs, and across physically separate networks. Nessus can also be used for ad-hoc scanning, daily scans, and quick-response audits.

Microsoft has dropped another ton or three of cash on Novell and in celebration they issued a joint press release announcing this new phase of their relationship. I was never a fan of the original deal, feeling that it violated the spirit if not the letter of the GPL. Some purport that it has increased the usage of Linux in the enterprise; that's a claim for which I don't have the numbers to verify or debunk. Honestly, I sort of doubt much of anyone really does.

Is it me? or has information security completely changed? Give you a bit of a background - I live, breathe, eat and sleep computer security. I'm not one of those"masturbating monkeys" as Linus puts it. But that's not what this rant is about.

Garry Saddington is ICT co-ordinator at Skegness Grammar School. It is a specialist sports college and a specialist maths and computing college with nearly 800 pupils, and has a boarding provision for around 60. Alistair Crust is responsible for serving the technology needs of the Skegness Grammar School community. All the school’s 180 curriculum computers run GNU/Linux. These run as thin-clients using the Linux Terminal Server Project, which uses low power clients with most of the processing being done on fewer, more powerful, servers.

KDE, GNOME, and Xfce are without doubt the most well-known desktop environments for Linux at the moment. They are utilized by majority of Linux Distributions simply because they are very much stable and usable. But did you know that there are other capable Free and Open-source desktop environments that you probably haven’t heard of?

Earlier this week, we ran a story on GoboLinux, and the distribution's effort to replace the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard with a more pleasant, human-readable, and logical design. A lot of people liked the idea of modernising/replacing the FHS, but just as many people were against doing so. Valid arguments were presented both ways, but in this article, I would like to focus on a common sentiment that came forward in that discussion: normal users shouldn't see the FHS, and advanced users are smart enough to figure out how the FHS works.

Are there enough Linux experts to go around? Here’s an interesting article in ComputerWorld from this week: “Linux unchained.” Author Mary Pratt investigates the claim that Linux growth is outstripping the supply of actual Linux-proficient techs.

Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court.

If patenting the obvious is considered something of an art form in the world of IT, then Microsoft is undoubtedly an old master. The Page Up Page Down patent it has been granted would seem to confirm this...

A sliding share price and gloomy forecasts have prompted speculation that Sun Microsystems might be a tempting takeover target for acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu or another tech giant. A sale would be momentous, involving billions of dollars and spelling the demise of one of Silicon Valley's most venerable companies. But no one has confirmed any talks.

The Linux-Embedded discussion list has been abuzz the last two days over a flash filesystem designed to support binary code execution (sometimes called XIP, or "execute-in-place"). When combined with forthcoming "Phase Change Memory" products, the "Advanced XiP Filesystem" (AXFS) could radically change the way Linux is embedded on consumer devices.

The TALPA malware scanning API was covered here in December, 2007. Several months later, TALPA is back - in the form of a patch set posted by a Red Hat employee. The resulting discussion has certainly not been what the TALPA developers would have hoped for; it is, instead, a good example of how a potentially useful idea can be set back by poor execution and presentation to the kernel community.

Since its inception, we've tried to make collections of tips, pointers to free tutorials, and advice on the best applications a regular part of the editorial content here at OStatic. These have included screenshot-driven guided tours to how to use top tier OSS applications, pointers to free tutorials on everything from AJAX to OpenOffice, and guidance on finding free open source webinars on topics such as MySQL and Ubuntu. We're in the process of putting up a dedicated repository for all of these, but in the meantime, here are 12 of our most popular educational roundup posts.

Unlike a lot of open-source supporters, I don't turn red with anger at the very thought of Novell working with Microsoft. Like it or not, getting Linux and Windows to work better together makes good, hard business sense. What I do find annoying is that Novell is continuing to feed Microsoft's FUD machine about Linux. In an e-mail interview with Ian Bruce, Novell's public relations director, Bruce wrote me that customers wanted the Novell/Microsoft package, in part, because it "provides IP (intellectual property) peace of mind for organizations operating in mixed source environments." It does? Since when?

A fine Saturday to you, or Sunday if you're an Australian who (according to my time charts) lives in the future ;) Today, we've got some more jokes and humour, of a Unix and Linux flavour. None of our senses of humour are probably exactly the same, but I try to pick out some halfway decent stuff for you and then, of course, refer you to the joke page where I found these little nuggets and heartily recommend that you check out the main workjoke.com site just in case you find a whole bunch of other stuff that makes you laugh on their other pages. I can't vouch for the content on a site I don't control (a lot of the jokes there are the same ones you've heard 50 times already today), but I thought this site offered a good bit of variety and some fresh material that warranted a little wholesome all-American co-opting. Of course, the credit for the content goes first to workjoke and then to the respective authors to whom they give attribution.

AcetoneISO2, is a feature-rich and complete software application to manage CD/DVD images. Thanks to powerful open source tools such as fuseiso, AcetoneISO2 will let You mount typical proprietary images formats of the Windows world such as ISO BIN NRG MDF IMG and is more than a simple ISO mount software.