Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The SA State IT Agency's Free and Open Source Programme Office (FPO) is to host a workshop this coming Friday in which free and open source software (FOSS) vendors will have a chance to demonstrate their products to government officials. The day-long workshop will include representatives from companies that were selected, in a 2005 tender process, as government-approved open source vendors.

I took a Computer Logic Design class in college, so when I stumbled upon the Ksimus Circuit Simulator, I was intrigued. At the risk of waxing nostalgic, I remember what it was like to build circuits in school. We'd spend hours the night before the lab designing our circuit, being careful to list each interconnection. We had to keep track of which pin numbers on each chip were to be connected.

A year ago, when a Time Magazine reporter told Tan Dailin that he'd been identified as someone who may have hacked the Pentagon, he gasped and asked, "Will the FBI send special agents out to arrest me?" The answer, it turns out, was, "No, the Chinese government will." Dailin, better known in Chinese hacker circles as Withered Rose, was reportedly picked up last month in Chengdu, China, by local authorities. He is now facing seven years in prison under a new Chinese cybercrime law that was passed in late February.

When Microsoft filed its lawsuit against TomTom, it named two patents which cover the VFAT filesystem. That, naturally, led to a renewed push to either (1) get those patents invalidated, or (2) move away from VFAT altogether. But some participants have advocated a third approach: find a way to work around the patents which retains most of the VFAT filesystem functionality while, with luck, avoiding any potential infringement of the claims of the patent. But, as a recently-posted patch and the ensuing discussion show, workarounds are not a straightforward solution even after the lawyers have been satisfied.

"Whoever has physical access to the machine owns it" is an old and true Unix saying. Still, there are some steps you can take to add extra security to your Linux box, such as password-protecting the boot process. Juliet Kemp shows how.

I've been wondering about what ever happened to these Windows XP-based OLPC trials. I haven't really heard anything about them in quite some time. Now more recently I've asked around and found there is a good reason why I haven't seen anything: countries are choosing Sugar over Windows XP for their XO deployments. Apparently the conversations are going pretty much as many of us had expected: Initially country representatives inquire if Windows XP runs on the XO laptop. That doesn't really come as a surprise - for many people Windows is the definition of a computer. However, upon further investigation every country decided to stick to Sugar.

Last year, when I was socializing the idea of creating the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, I gave a presentation I called "ODF Interoperability: The Price of Success". The observation was that standards that fail never need to deal with interoperability. The creation of test suites, convening of multi-vendor interoperability workshops and plugfests is a sign of a successful standard, one which is implemented by many vendors, one which is adopted by many users, one which has vendor-neutral venues for testing implementations and iteratively refining the standard itself.

Everybody loves the wild and wacky names that end up gracing releases of the various Linux distributions throughout the year, even if some of them — we're not going to name names, that might hurt our karma — have gotten a bit more bizarre of late. Among the more interesting processes for picking release names comes from the Fedora Project, where unlike most other distributions, the new name must share a unique link to its predecessor. Its time then to put your thinking caps on, as the race to make that most creative of links is underway.

Finally, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation agree on something. Neither wants to stand behind their products. OK, OK, that's not fair. However, the Linux group and software maker are both opposing a law group's proposal that would create an implied warranty that software products ship with no material defects. The two joined forces on a letter to the American Law Institute taking issue with its proposal. Microsoft and the Linux Foundation believe the proposal could do more harm than good.

The developers of the cluster file system GlusterFS, not to be confused with the now Sun-owned ClusterFS company that make the Lustre cluster file system, have released version 2.0 of their software. GlusterFS is able to aggreagate various storage systems connected over Infiband or TCP/IP to create one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS uses FUSE and runs in the userspace, making it more portable and easier to install. It has been deployed in production with a number of organisations.

This is an open letter that I plan to publish on Linux Medical News and elsewhere. As you probably know, your JAMA 'Hold Harmless' article presents just the tip of the iceberg.

Developer Chris Ball has announced that the upcoming OLPC XO-1.5 laptop software release will be based on Fedora 11. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for self-education.

I took a Computer Logic Design class in college, so when I stumbled upon the Ksimus Circuit Simulator, I was intrigued. At the risk of waxing nostalgic, I remember what it was like to build circuits in school. We'd spend hours the night before the lab designing our circuit, being careful to list each interconnection. We had to keep track of which pin numbers on each chip were to be connected.

Should the Linux faithful go on the wagon and give up Wine entirely? Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth seemed to imply as much when he said in a recent Q&A that "the free software ecosystem needs to thrive on its own rules." Yet he also said that both Wine and native Linux ports "play an important role." Linux bloggers have been hashing out the issue from every conceivable angle.

The OWASP LiveCD is a collection of open-source security software for web developers as well as external and internal testers/auditors, that does very much the same job as the BackTrack LiveCD does for network and system penetration tests. Matt Tesauro is the project's new maintainer and new versions have appeared since its redesign in the autumn of 2008.

The first openSUSE Community Week took place on the 11-17 May 2009 and as an important part of the distribution, the geeko-loving KDE community were actively involved. Throughout the week we were busy packaging, triaging bugs and introducing new community members to these skills. The releases of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 and Amarok 2.1 Beta 2 kept the team busy fixing last minute compilation errors and replacing 4.2.3 in the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repository with 4.3 Beta 1 as we move towards openSUSE 11.2. KDE 4.2 continues to be available in the KDE:42 repository so if you haven't switched yet, we expect you want to help make 4.3 excellent!

After last week's tip on how to upgrade a stable Mandriva Linux to the distribution's development branch (Cooker), we'll continue the series with a tutorial on running Slackware "Current", the development branch of the world's oldest surviving Linux distro. In the news section, Fedora presents a tentative look at a possible feature set for its next version; Ubuntu announces a new service for cloud computing amid controversy over its proprietary nature; the Debian-Desktop project launches new KDE 4 packages for "Lenny", and PC-BSD continues to expand its desktop options with Xfce and GNOME. Also in this week's issue - a roadmap for Sabayon Linux covering the rest of 2009 and a new security oriented live CD with OWASP.

Red Hat's going up against business-rules giants IBM and Oracle with a management system that builds on its popular JBoss application server. The company is today expected to announce the JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System to separate code from business rules in a system. The idea is to let you build and maintain business processes without needing to re-code the applications.

The DisplayLink USB display system, which allows Windows and Mac systems to drive multiple displays connected via USB 2.0 using custom lossless compression technology, is coming to Linux. The release, by DisplayLink, of libdlo, an LGPL 2.1 licensed library, will allow Linux developers to discover and connect to DisplayLink devices. This is the first step in developing application level support, such as X servers and other graphic platforms.

LXer Feature: 18-May-2009

The Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0 beta of its Prism software. Danijel Orsolic puts a new take on the semantics of whether Linux is an OS or not. Paul Rubens shows us how to optimize hard drives for maximum speed in Linux and Pogoplug, which is a little device that can connect to a USB 2.0 hard drive and an Ethernet connection, and then instantly makes the drive an Internet-accessible storage device promises to publish the source-code if the product fails.