Showing all newswire headlines

O'Reilly Media has published a new edition of its Linux certification volume. LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell, Second Edition is modeled after the Linux Professional Institute's job-based certification program, which currently focuses on two-year (Level 1) and four-year (Level 2) experienced candidates.

The new breed of rootkits is operating system-agnostic. 64-bit implementations of BSD, Linux, MacOS X, Windows Vista are all considered vulnerable, as long as they're riding atop the wrong chips from AMD and Intel. VM rootkits quietly sieze control of the chips' virtualization technology to control or pervert any and every process the attacker chooses. Current defense possibilities are depressingly mechanical.

Digium Inc., the creator of the Asterisk open source PBX, on Wednesday announced it has secured $13.2 million in its first round of venture capital funding from Matrix Partners, a well-known VC firm within the open source community.

A VMware Player image of KDE 3.5.4 with KOffice 1.5.2 running on SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available. The image is fully functional and can be upgraded and tweaked as needed. The VMware Player necessary to run it can be downloaded for free and is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux.

[VMware is not free/libre. See the comments following the announcement. -- grouch]

An application to test stability when building new systems or in case of operating problems. It starts several resource-demanding tasks simultaneously. The individual tasks may be turned on or off. After the expiry of the set runtime, a detailed table broken down to threads summarises the results. It is ideal for determining hidden problems and for thermal tests.

[Note this application is marked, "Shareware". Without the source, you can't be sure what it is doing. -- grouch]

This is one of the best expert reviews on hardware I’ve read so far: Debian Developer Steinar H. Gunderson decided to buy a Dell Latitude D420 laptop, and tells us about his experiences with it.

It's well known that Google runs its vast array of servers using a custom version of GNU/Linux. But this is only one aspect of its support for free software. Others include its Summer of Code, now well established as an incubator of both coding talent and projects, and more recently its open source code repository, which offers a useful alternative to Sourceforge.net. Similarly, in porting Picasa to GNU/Linux, Google has made contributions to Wine, while open source projects in Sri Lanka have been the beneficiaries of more direct help, to the tune of $25,000.

But Google is also operating behind the scenes to bolster free software in other ways.

Linspire Inc. was going to announce the release of Freespire 1.0 -- its free, Debian-based desktop Linux operating system that combines open-source software with legally-licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and applications -- next week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. Instead, this new desktop Linux distribution has emerged early.

Four penguins died along with all the exotic fish being transported by truck to the zoo in Galveston, Texas. The truck overturned on US Highway 59 near Marshall Tuesday. One penguin died in the crash. Three others were hit by passing motorists. [Sorry folks, I couldn't resist posting this. Wonder if any were related to TUX or Adele.] Don K.

For almost 100 years a group of women called the Sisters of Mercy have been instilling a spirit of excellence into Baltimore's biggest hospital, appropriately named Mercy. Right from the start, the Sisters have made it their goal to push the medical institution beyond the ordinary by creating teaching affiliations, feeding the hungry, building state-of-the-art emergency services, and launching a neighborhood health center for the inner-city poor. In today's world, all that excellence requires a solid technology infrastructure -- and one open source management package to manage a variety of systems.

EnterpriseDB, which has built an Oracle-compatible edition of PostgreSQL, will offer support to Sun's Solaris customers

Apple provides source for XNU (Intel, from 10.4.7. up, under APSL), iCal Server (under Apache Licence), rereleases Bonjour and Launchd under Apache Licence, opens Mac OS Forge for supporting WebKit and other FOSS projects focused on OS X.

The Hard PartsI hate hardware. Sometimes I hate Linux too, but more often I just hate the hardware. Boxes, wires, connectors, keyboards, mice, the works. Some days I just want all of it to disappear.

This is a nice list of some of the best educational and promotional videos on Free Software/Open Source and Free Culture, from The Corruptibles to the Lawrence Lessigs speech. The list may expand.

You've probably heard of full disclosure, the security philosophy that calls for making public all details of vulnerabilities. It has been the subject of debates among researchers, vendors, and security firms. But the story that grabbed most of the headlines at the Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas last week was based on a different type of disclosure. For lack of a better name, I'll call it faux disclosure. Here's why.

Desktop migration specialist Versora on Aug. 8 released an updated version (v2.0) of its Progression Desktop Windows to Linux desktop migration software, a tool that helps users to transfer files and settings from their Windows system to a Linux system.

[And you can see our interview with Versora - dcparris]

"As an open, nonproprietary operating system, Linux provides flexibility, freedom of choice and a cost advantage that makes it compelling as a viable alternative to Windows Mobile, Symbian and other proprietary offerings," said analyst Stacey Quandt.

With the release of the 2.6.18-rc3-mm1 kernel, Andrew Morton [interview] included a brief note stating, "fwiw, I recently took a position with Google." He then linked to aLinux Today article which details the reasons behind his recent move. The article begins, "Andrew Morton has started working for a new company, but his day job as the Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer will remain exactly the same." In the article, Andrew discusses one of the reasons Google was a good fit, "in my position as kernel maintainer I feel that I should not be employed by a company which has a direct interest in the kernel.org kernel because this would put me in a position of making decisions which are commercially significant to my employer's competitors. As Google maintains their own kernel variant for internal use, their interests are largely decoupled from what happens in the kernel.org kernel."

Texas Instruments (TI) has published an 18-minute videocast about programming its DaVinci RISC/DSP chips using Green Hills Software's (GHS) "Multi" IDE (integrated development environment). Used with a hardware JTAG probe, Multi permits simultaneous OS-aware debugging of Linux and DSP BIOS executives running on the DaVinci chips, GHS says.

This article discusses the shared libraries concept in both Windows and Linux, and offers a walk-through through various data structures to explain how dynamic linking is done in these operating systems. The paper will be useful for developers interested in the security implications and the relative speed of dynamic linking, and assumes some prior cursory knowledge with dynamic linking.

[This should be interesting. - dcparris]