Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While betas of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 platform have been available for a number of months after being announced in the last half of 2008, their free software implementation of Silverlight, which is known as Moonlight and developed largely by Novell with the Mono developers, has lagged behind.

Microsoft has attempted to block the court-ordered end to sales of Microsoft Word over a patent dispute. But court papers show that company officers were aware of the patent when they took the infringing action.

There are a lot of bogus VPN (virtual private network) products sold for big bucks that are not real VPNs at all, but SSL portals. OpenVPN is a genuine secure VPN that supports both site-to-site tunnels, to create a nice secure WAN on the cheap, and remote individual clients. Eric Geier shows us how to use the Untangle gateway to set up a good stout OpenVPN server the easy way.

LMMS is music creation software similar to programs such as GarageBand for OSX and FL Studio for Windows. Those programs are designed to streamline the process of making music with a computer in order to get new users into music composition as quickly and painlessly as possible. Their feature sets include preset audio loops, MIDI tracks, and other ready-made musical materials available for immediate use in a piece. Their GUIs invite involvement in the process of making music and it's clear that the designers want the user to have fun with the program and the process. In this mini-review we'll see if LMMS lives up to the precedents set by those programs.

Free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is celebrating a new milestone – an article on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen added on Monday took the English-language version of Wikipedia over the three million article mark. The encyclopaedia, which first went online in January 2001, now contains a total of more than 13 million articles in more than 200 languages. The English-language Wikipedia, as the oldest version, remains the leading version. The German version is second with more than 940,000 articles, and the French version is third with 840,000 articles.

It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2009

The Register's latest video webcast, an expert look at open source and traditional proprietary software models, is now available on-demand from the Reg archives. This broadcast explores the relative merits of open source and traditional proprietary software, and discusses how they can best be made to co-exist happily. El Reg event moderator Tim Phillips welcomed Steve Harris of Novell and Freeform Dynamics' Tony Lock into our swanky London studio. Joining the chaps over the wire from across the pond were Frank Rego of Novell and Jose Thomas of Microsoft.

This week at Phoronix we published two articles that had benchmarks that generated quite a bit of interest and feedback: The Cost of SELinux, Audit, and Kernel Debugging and Arch Linux 2009.8 Benchmarks. The test results in these two articles were, of course, powered by the Phoronix Test Suite, for which we had additional news about this week. We had published an open letter to tech review web-sites challenging them to embrace Linux-based benchmarking.

Sixteen years ago today, Ian Murdock announced the "imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release". The release was to be called the Debian Linux Release and was the start of one of the most popular community based distributions of Linux. It also became the basis for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Debian GNU/Linux is renowned for its community's commitment to a free software philosophy.

CentOS must seem like a dream distribution to many. Its users get the benefit of the massive team of developers that Red Hat has working on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product without having to pay for any of it. CentOS offers a level of stability that cannot be found in any of the more community-oriented distributions; even Debian Stable requires its users to upgrade more often than CentOS does. Hosting providers have a solid, supported platform to sell to many thousands of customers, and it does not cost them even a single devalued US dollar. Many, many sites depend on CentOS, so anything which threatens the stability of that foundation is certain to raise a number of eyebrows. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened at the end of July.

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey. By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

The amount of time a given release of a Linux distribution is support is of paramount interest to its users. After all, large-scale deployments depend on stability, and stability means support. Some users of openSUSE are liable to be feeling a bit shaken this week, after the project announced that the support period for its releases has been cut by a fourth.

A Linux kernel bug in network socket initialization could allow an attacker to acquire root privileges to inflict damages. The security hole applies to all kernels of the 2.4 and 2.5 series and has been around possibly since 2001.

If you like the reliability of Debian Stable, buy yearn for some newer packages from Testing or Unstable, you can have it all. Juliet Kemp shows us how to run a mixed Debian installation and pull packages from whatever version we desire.

Arch Linux 2009.08 was released earlier this week with a new installer, more automatic configuration settings, many core package updates, and other changes to this growingly popular distribution. At the request of some readers, we have carried out some quick benchmarks to get a general understanding of where Arch Linux 2009.08 is performing in comparison to Ubuntu 9.04.

It has been 15 years since Marc Andreessen developed the Netscape Internet browser that introduced millions of people to the Internet. After its early success, Netscape was roundly defeated by Microsoft in the so-called browser wars of the 1990s that dominated the Web’s first chapter. Mr. Andreessen appears to want a rematch. Now a prominent Silicon Valley financier, Mr. Andreessen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, staffed with some of his close associates, that is building a new Internet browser, according to people with knowledge of his investment.

A steady stream of manufacturers are requesting Linux drivers for their hardware, suggesting growing adoption of Linux operating systems among enterprises. According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, Novell programmer and Linux Driver Project lead, the group of some 400 programmers at the Project receive requests to port existing closed-source drivers to open source drivers for Linux "all the time", and has been "doing a lot of work on this over the past few years".

Black Duck has analysed its database of 200,000 open source programs to see which programming languages are most popular. The database is used by the company as part of their compliance and license management services.

Penguin Computing, a company that provides high-performance computing resources to researchers, scientists and engineers, has begun offering its services in the cloud. Penguin On Demand (POD) became available on Tuesday. The company said the service is intended for those who need HPC capabilities without having to acquire the clustered infrastructure required for that level of computing.