Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This spring sees a burst of activity for Linux distributions. In addition to Ubuntu and Mandriva, FreeBSD and OpenBSD also put final touches on their new releases

Acer's Nvidia Ion-based micro desktop PC, Revo, will go on sale in the UK on 5 May, with Ubuntu Linux among the available operating systems. Open source software fans shouldn't rush to the shops, though - Acer expects to tweak the Ubuntu machine's spec very shortly after release.

In tech circles, Washington state may be best known as Microsoft's stomping grounds -- but it's also home to a thriving community of people devoted to Linux and other open-source programs. That community is gathering Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham for one of its big annual events: LinuxFest Northwest, now in its 10th year.

As the last round of quarterly reports rolled in, Apple's didn't look so hot—until they were followed by mediocre results from Microsoft and an absolute disaster for Sony. This time around, with everyone's expectations lowered by months of economic turmoil, Apple's results looked pretty good, but Microsoft put a quick stop to any speculation that the good news for Cupertino was a general sign. The economy hit Microsoft hard, knocking profits down by nearly a third from where they were a year ago, with nearly every division of the company seeing a drop in revenue. After these results, I fear for Sony.

What does benchmarking a Dell Inspiron Mini 9, a Radeon HD 4890 graphics card with Intel Core i7, and dual quad-core AMD Opterons look like? Well, if the systems are running Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, or Mac OS X, it can look like this..

The National Science Foundation on Thursday said it has awarded nearly $5 million in grants to 14 universities so they can participate in theIBM (NYSE: IBM)-Google (NSDQ: GOOG) cloud computing initiative for research projects. Through the NSF's Cluster Exploratory, or CLuE, program, the universities will use software and services running on the IBM-Google data center. The companies launched the joint university initiative in 2007 to help teach computer science students.

Along with Linux, Java's been one of the biggest boons for Oracle. It's become the anchor of Oracle's middleware and developer strategy, and - with Linux - ended Oracle's one-time dependence on Microsoft as the only alternative to IBM. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin has said he does not see Oracle's commitment to Linux lessening just because it wants to take ownership of a Solaris business.

If you're a Linux fan, there's a bit of a tendency to think that Linux and open source are two ways of saying the same thing. However, plenty of FOSS projects exist that don't have anything to do with Linux, and plenty of projects originated on Linux that now are available on other systems.

Earlier this month Intel had pushed out the xf86-video-intel 2.7 graphics driver that brought a variety of new features and fixes. This 2.7 X.Org driver has been rolled into Intel's "2009Q1 Package" along with Mesa 7.4 plus a few more patches, the Linux 2.6.29.1 kernel plus a few more patches, and libdrm 2.4.9. It is also suggested that X Server 1.6.1 be used with this recommended Intel software configuration.

Without encryption protecting your email messages, you might as well be sending postcards because anyone can intercept and read them. Juliet Kemp tells how to protect your email privacy with GPG and Thunderbird.

Sun Microsystems has released a new version of its OpenSSO Express identity management solution with support for Google Apps Premier. OpenSSO Express is targeted at companies and organisations that rely on Google's software-as-a-service solution (SaaS) as their central communications platform. With it individuals can use a cross-company single sign-on (SSO) to access the web, mail and other applications.

According to this press release: "Washington, D.C. —Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV today introduced legislation that will facilitate nationwide adoption of electronic health records, particularly among small, rural providers. The Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009 will build upon the successful use of “open source” electronic health records by the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the “open source exchange model,” which was recently expanded among federal agencies through the Nationwide Health Information Network-Connect initiative..."

Today is the big day you have been waiting for, the day where Ubuntu 9.04 is released. I hope you have successfully downloaded the LiveCD and installed it on your system. For those who have difficulties installing or migrating to Ubuntu, we thought this would be a good time to bring a nice little cheat sheet/installation guide for all MakeTechEasier readers.

Earlier this week I discussed some of the challenges that OLPC faces with regard to the announcement of the XO-1.5. However I believe that Sugar Labs will also have to deal with some interesting challenges as result of this announcement. For Sugar Labs the XO-1.5 will mainly be yet another device that they'll want to support given that it's likely to be one of the best choices when it comes to low-cost portable hardware for developing countries. However given the pitiful state of Sugar 0.84 on the XO-1 hardware (check mavrothal's forum comments for more information) - which won't be improved until Fedora 12 is released in autumn - I remain skeptical of just how well Sugar will run on the XO-1.5.

It's that time again, ladies and gents & mdash; time for the biannual release of a new Ubuntu version. This time it's the Jaunty Jackalope, officially Ubuntu 9.04, rolling off the line, and bringing with it a fresh new set of features users have been longing for. Prime among the features being touted by the Ubuntu camp are improvements in speed, perhaps rather fitting for a release named for the jackalope. Boot speed is reportedly greatly improved, as low as twenty-five seconds in some cases. Hibernation and suspend/resume have been enhanced, including immediate availability post-hibernation. Those we spoke to noted an impressive improvement in boot speed, significant even for virtual machines, as well as dramatic speed improvements in finding and connecting to wireless networks.

The annual Linux kernel summit may gain the most attention, but the size of the kernel community makes it hard to get deeply into subsystem-specific topics at that event. So, increasingly, kernel developers gather for more focused events where some real work can be done. One of those gatherings is the Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop; the 2009 workshop began on April 6. Here is your editor's summary of the discussions which took place on the first day.

The Internet Systems Consortium has announced that it has received enough support from sponsors to launch the BIND 10 project, to create a replacement name server for BIND 9. BIND 9 began its development in 1998 and is the most widely used DNS server software on the Internet. Among the sponsors are the UK's Nominet and Germany's DENIC.

The verdict in the Pirate Bay trial surprised many people, seeing as how many errors the entertainment industry's lawyers had made, and how little understanding they seemed to have of how BitTorrent works. The height of the sentence also surprised many; for aiding in sharing just 33 copyrighted items, the four founders were sentenced to one year in jail, and a massive fine of 3.6 million USD. Well, as it turns out, we now know why we were all relatively surprised: the judge in the case, Thomas Norstrom, is member of the same pro-copyright groups as many of the people representing the entertainment industry in the case. Sveriges Radio's P3 news programme has found out that judge Thomas Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association. And who are also members of this group? Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, who all three represented the entertainment industry in the case against the Pirate Bay.

A flaw in the open OAuth online authentication protocol has prompted major OAuth providers like Twitter and Yahoo to suspend their support of this protocol and stop offering this service for the time being. The security hole allows attackers to trick their way into obtaining user data. The OAuth protocol will need to be updated to fix the vulnerability.

Note: The following post is a guest blog submitted to Microsoft Subnet by a security expert who wished to remain anonymous. Joanna Rutkowska recently released her new security whitepaper and exploit code entitled Attacking SMM Memory via Intel CPU Cache Poisoning. The thing that struck me about her research is just how easy this is to do. There is nothing super fancy or complex about the exploit code. Due to its simplicity, the odds are very high that this attack vector has been in use, even before this research published last month. Still, because this attack is so stealthy, we wouldn’t necessarily have been able to detect it.