Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A group of OpenBSD developers have joined in the AerieBSD project. A new distro is being prepared whose likeness to OpenBSD is unmistakable.

Google has released version 2.0.172.43 of Chrome 2, a security update fixing three vulnerabilities. A high-severity vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript engine could allow an attacker to run specially-crafted JavaScript on a page, bypassing security checks to read unauthorised memory, or even leading to the execution of arbitrary code. The vulnerability is reportedly contained to the Chrome sandbox. According to Google, for an attack to be successful, a "victim would need to visit a page under an attacker's control". Further details of the vulnerability, however, are currently being withheld until "a majority of users are up to date with the fix".

With the release of version 4.3, the majority of users finally seem to accept -- if not necessarily love -- the changes in KDE4. At this point, it seems fair to ask: How successful are the KDE 4 series of releases?

The Free Software Foundation is mobilizing against Windows 7 with a campaign to dissuade IT decision makers from installing the operating system. The group's sent letters to 499 of the top Fortune 500 organizations, warning that a move to Windows 7 will increase their dependence on Microsoft and encouraging the use of GNU/Linux on PCs instead. The missing letter recipient was Microsoft.

In an eWEEK interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says his company is "defining a whole new business model" by applying collaborative principles similar to those behind Facebook and Wikipedia. Whitehurst speaks out on open source business models, RHEL 5.4's KVM hypervisor, and the cloud. The Whitehurst interview, conducted by eWEEK's Chris Preimesberger, arrives as the Linux distribution and services giant preps for its annual Red Hat Summit on Sept. 1-4 in Chicago. The company is expected to make a major announcement about Red Hat Linux Enterprise (RHEL), writes Preimesberger.

Rolex, movies, Gucci, and even Sharpie pens, among other consumer goods, are well known for reaching a level of ubiquity where people start producing fakes or knock-offs. From our industry, even Steve Jobs’ personal brand warranted a knock-off in the form the FakeSteveJobs blog. Linux, too, has reached that level of ubiquity and maturity. We all use Linux every day via our bank ATMs, our cars, our netbooks, the Internet (Google, Facebook and more), and the list goes on. Thus, the Linus Torvalds knock-offs have naturally come forth.

The news started to emerge in various Twitter feeds and personal blog posts Monday: David Recordon, a Six Apart developer and prominent open standards advocate, has left the blog software company to take a job at Facebook.

Australian sales of mini-notebooks jumped a massive 398.4% in the second quarter of this year, compared with 12 months ago. It's clear evidence that consumers prefer mobile PCs, even when they come with a higher price tag than a desktop equivalent.

About two months ago, Intel and Nokia announced a strategic partnership without mentioning any concrete products. The first product announcement followed today: With the Booklet 3G, Nokia will offer a 10-inch netbook (and its first netbook altogether) – equipped, of course, with an Atom processor.

While the KDE community busied itself with preparations for the 4.3 release, KDE 4 continued to spread to new platforms with ReactOS user Davy Bartoloni reporting (machine translation of original Italian) some success in running KDE applications on that operating system.

An SSL portal isn't as secure as a real VPN (virtual private network) such as OpenVPN, but it's easier to set up. The Untangle gateway makes setting up and managing an SSL-based Web portal fast and easy; Eric Geier shows how.

The KDE vs. GNOME debate — which we sincerely hope we aren't sparking anew — is one of the great legacies of the Linux world. Everyone seems to have an opinion, whether it's passionate support for one coupled with vehement odium for the other, a more general sense of "This is what I started with," or a love of an entirely different, less mainstream desktop environment. All of those sentiments have surely been on display within the openSUSE community of late, as the distribution has worked its way towards choosing a default desktop.

Microsoft is a true master when it comes to ignoring Web standards. Thanks to Google, that could now change in terms of the SVG vector graphics format.

Litigation between the SCO Group and Novell over the copyright to Unix grinds slowly onwards. The Court of Appeals has affirmed that SCO must pay approximately $2.5 million in royalties to Novell, but has remanded the question of whether the copyright to Unix was passed on to SCO when the distribution rights were sold, back to the Utah District Court for retrial.

A US federal appeals court overturned a judge’s ruling that granted Novell the copyright of the Unix computer OS yesterday. A panel of three judges of the 10th US circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a judge in the August 2007 case wrongfully handed the copyright to Novell. As a result the panel has ordered a “remand for trial” to establish ownership.

Network device drivers have been using the increasingly misnamed NAPI ("new API") interface for some time now. NAPI allows a network driver to turn off interrupts from an interface and go into a polling mode. Polling is often seen as a bad thing, but it's really only a problem when poll attempts turn up no useful work to do. With a busy network interface, there will always be new packets to process; "polling," in this situation, really means "going off to deal with the accumulated work." When there is always work to do, interrupts informing the system of that fact are really just added noise. Your editor likes to compare the situation to email notifications; anybody who gets a reasonable volume of email is quite likely to turn such notifications off. They are distracting, and there is probably always email waiting whenever one gets around to checking.

A federal appeals court Monday overturned a 2007 decision that Novell owns the Unix code, and the ruling now clears the way for SCO to pursue a $1 billion copyright infringement case against IBM. In a 54-page decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said it was reversing the 2007 summary judgment decision by Judge Dale Kimball of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, which found that Novell was the owner of Unix and UnixWare copyrights.

Many Linux users, even the newest ones, love Linux because it is highly customizable. KDE in particular is one desktop environment that is very easy and fun to customize. Whether you want three panels and a rotating slideshow of wallpaper photos from your vacation in Peru, or simply want to make sure text files always open in your favorite text editor, KDE can deliver. One important customization features is file association.

It was with much joy that the Linux community saw two harmful myths about open source get put in their places recently. Myth #1: Linux is bad for business. Linux Foundation: More than 70 percent of work on the kernel today is done by developers who are being paid for their efforts. Myth #2: Linux netbooks have a high rate of customer returns. Dell: No more so than Windows netbooks.

Recently the dot carried an article about the first public release of PySide, LGPL python bindings to Qt. We conducted a short interview with one of the people behind PySide, Nokia employee Matti Airas