Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Wikimedia Foundation has received another major donation. Today Google announced that it is donating two million dollars to the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet," explained Google co-founder Sergey Brin, "This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales emphasised the long friendship between Google and Wikimedia, "Both organisations are committed to bringing high quality information to hundreds of millions of individuals every day, and to making the Internet better for everyone."

Ever wonder whether a given FLOSS project is going to succeed or flounder? Need a little help reading the tea leaves? Now you can follow along at home with a handy scorecard that looks at everything from source control to project communication. A little history. I was researching a project yesterday that required potential users and contributors to pull source from a Git repository, rather than simply downloading a zip file or tarball with the source and other materials that users would need. I mentioned this on Twitter, and Karsten Wade of the Fedora project pointed out the scorecard on the newly launched guide to helping people learn to interact with and build community, Open Source Way.

Just as they did last year, over thirty international security organisations have come together, to publish a list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors leading to vulnerabilities that can be exploited for cybercrime and espionage. The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors has been updated with a number of improvements to how the errors are graded, prioritised and categorised. For example, new "Focus Profiles" allow readers to quickly see the listed errors sorted for particular professionals' interests.

As of this writing (Tuesday Feb 16th) there don't seem to be any new suggestions from Microsoft to assist XP users whose systems were rendered un-bootable after installing the February 9th patches. For example, the last entry on The Microsoft Security Response Center blog is four days old. So let me offer a suggestion: boot to Linux and move some files around. Windows Update on XP is architected [sic] to allow for the backing out of patches. The problem is that this depends on the system being bootable, so it's of no use when even Safe Mode is unavailable, as is the case here. And, as I wrote last time, the official troubleshooting tool from Microsoft, the Recovery Console, is unusable for many, if not most, Windows XP users.

For an open source company, nurturing a community around the software is as important as picking the right licence. Although developer communities tend to be more self-starting with a reasonably open development process, user communities, which are a source of valuable feedback, need more encouragement. The H went to the first meeting of the UK BIRT User Group (BUG) to see how one company was helping to create a user community.

PHP might have put the "P" in LAMP - the all open-source server stack - but on the desktop, it seems that those using PHP generally prefer the "W" to the "L." In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The most heated talk this year during FOSDEM in the X.Org development room was certainly the talk by Luc Verhaegen with his ambitions to clean up the Linux graphics driver stack. Building the entire X.Org stack can be a mess and there is certainly areas to improve upon in the development process and making it easier for end-users and others to test out this latest code. Luc's goal for this is to create unified trees for each driver that contain all of the driver-specific code rather than having various bits scattered all over the place.

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver. What makes this open-source 3D support for NVIDIA GPUs even more interesting is that it is atop the Gallium3D driver architecture rather than classic Mesa. With that said, we are providing early benchmarks of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 with two GeForce graphics cards as we compare the performance to NVIDIA's official Linux driver.

Dr. Ali Jahangiri, the well known security expert and author of Live Hacking: The Ultimate Guide to Hacking Techniques & Countermeasures for Ethical Hackers & IT Security Experts, is pleased to announce the launch of the Live Hacking CD, a new Linux distribution designed for ethical hacking. The Live Hacking CD contains the tools and utilities you need to test and hack your own network but using the tools and techniques that more malicious hackers would use. As a derivative of Ubuntu this 'Live CD' runs directly from the CD and doesn’t need installing on your hard-drive. Once booted you can use the included tools to perform penetration tests and ethically hack on your own network to ensure that it is secure from outside intruders. As well as the standard Linux networking tools the Live Hacking CD has tools for DNS enumeration and reconnaissance as well as utilities for foot-printing, password cracking and network sniffing. It also has programs for spoofing and a set of wireless networking utilities.

Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the KDE 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity. Those who expect everything to behave exactly as it did in the KDE 3 series may still struggle with 4.4. But, for those willing to accept change, 4.4 has no shortage of new features to offer, ranging from the implementation of several long-term directions to enhanced usability on the desktop -- including Plasma Netbook, a new interface designed specifically for netbook computers. Released a week ago, KDE 4.4 is rapidly finding its way into distributions. Packages have already found their way into the Debian testing and unstable repositories, and guides are available for installing the new version in many major distributions, including Fedora, openSuse, and Ubuntu.

WordPress users rejoice! The latest release of BuddyPress finally brings all that social media goodness to standard WordPress installs. With BuddyPress 1.2, it should only take three steps to get BuddyPress working with a standard WordPress install. BuddyPress was initially developed to add social networking features to a site based on WordPress MU (multiuser), and a stable release followed in 2009, but only for that platform. Installing BuddyPress in the early days was not trivial.

How much functionality can you pack into a 64×64 square? That’s the basic question behind many dockapps – utilities that can be run on the “dock” of many popular desktop environments. While most of them are designed for Step-type window managers such as Windowmaker, these dockapps can also run in things like XFCE, Fluxbox and Openbox. They include system monitors, volume controls, program launchers, email checkers and more. Today we’ll check out some of the more useful dockapps out there, and each will include screen shots, descriptions, and any little notes that might help when it comes to usage. All of the dockapps below are available in the standard Ubuntu repositories. Most of these, and many additional dockapps, can be found at Dockapps.org. Also, as hinted in the opening paragraph, most of these are designed with Windowmaker in mind, which is why so many start with the letters wm.

Acer announced three new Android smartphones, as well as an Android 2.1 version of its Liquid phone. Acer's BeTouch e400 and BeTouch E110 fall into the mid- and low-end range, while the Acer "Liquid e" and Formula One styled Acer Ferrari smartphone both appear to target the upper ranges of Android phones.

The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle's main message to Sun's customers seems to be "Don't worry, be happy." That's not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice and OpenSolaris. In general, we know that Sun's software product catalog will be cut back and that many Sun staffers will soon be laid off. Historically, when Oracle acquires a company, deep cuts are the rule. For example, Oracle fired about 5,000 workers after acquiring PeopleSoft. This time around, Oracle is saying that there will be only about a thousand layoffs. In particular, although no one is going on record, it's feared that Sun's open-source groups will take the brunt of these cuts.

At this year's Mobile World Congress(MWC) in Barcelona, while Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7 Series this week, a number of other companies are announcing their new Android-based devices. The open source Android OS devices, which range from mobile phones and notebooks, to tablets and Internet Devices, include updates to popular well known handsets and several new mobiles.

Eric Geier reviews 10 essential Firefox add-ons that will make your cross-platform Mozilla web browser even better. He finds add-ons to help fix annoyances, save time, discover advanced functionality, and stay connected.

It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers. That is why we started the GNUmed Live project on sourceforge. This gives us the room we need to offer GNUmed in a form that allows users to try GNUmed without going through the whole installation process.

The "operating system for embedded smart objects", Contiki, has been updated to version 2.4 with new experimental platforms and improved stability. The BSD licensed operating system is designed to be small, highly portable and work in networked, but memory constrained systems, such as sensor network nodes. Typical configurations can use as little as 2KB of RAM and 40KB of ROM and Contiki has been ported to computers such as the Commodore 64 and microcontrollers such as the TI MSP430 and Atemel AVR.

For the longest time I have been less than a fan of KDE 4. From the initial release, up until about 4.3.0 I was, well, less than impressed. It was buggy; it felt unstable at all points; and what was worse, for any new user who made the mistake of using a distribution with KDE 4, it gave the Linux operating system a bad name. No one wanted to use a desktop that might crash at any given moment, suck up 100% of a system CPU, or lose data. It simply wasn’t worth the effort. But this morning I decided to give the latest iteration of KDE (4.3.5) a try and see what it had to offer. Could it make stable what had previously been so lacking in stability? And, more importantly, could it make me think KDE was once again a viable desktop for every day use. Let’s take a look and see.

Maybe you've seen your favorite extensions fall behind when new Firefox releases roll out, but you haven't known what to do about it. A new-ish Mozilla add-on not only enables technically incompatible extensions for testing, but makes reporting actual incompatibilities easy.