Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mozilla updated Firefox to version 3.5.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Thursday, fixing a security problem, improving stability, and speeding launch time on some Windows systems, according to the release notes.

Going from Windows to Linux need not be done all at once. You don't need to throw yourself into the deep end of the pool in order to learn how to swim. For those with a Microsoft habit they want to kick but don't want to go cold turkey, here are some ways to ease into Linux without giving up Windows -- well, not immediately, anyway.

Btrfs, the designated "next generation file system" for Linux, offers a range of features that are not available in other Linux file systems – and it's nearly ready for production use.

Open source project Amarok, in an open letter to Palm, has invited the company to work with them. The reason: the Apple iTunes 8.2.1 update guarantees that the Linux-based Palm Pre smartphone can no longer use the iTunes music management software.

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).

It has been a while since we last had any major to report on VIA with their open-source efforts, but this morning they have finally published DRM code that supports their Chrome 9 IGP hardware. The announcement regarding this new Chrome 9 DRM was made on the dri-devel list and was made up of three patches.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.1 to fix the recently reported security vulnerability in the Just-in-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler, an exploit for the Windows version of which is already doing the rounds. Attackers can exploit the vulnerability to inject and execute code on vulnerable systems. Since JIT is a new feature that only appeared in Firefox 3.5, prior versions do not contain the vulnerability. Users who had previously deactivated JIT as a work around can now safely re-activate it, after installing the update.

For some, Redmond's decision to apply its "Community Promise" to C# and CLI came as a great relief. For others, caution was the watchword. Then there were those who were downright suspicious: "We do not respect promises of drug dealers and pedophiles; we should not accept the promise of a habitual offender of anti-competition law to restrain its evil tendencies," said blogger Robert Pogson.

Development distributions play a crucial role in the free software ecosystem. They are the proving ground where much new software is first exposed to a wider user community; they are also the place where this software demonstrates how well it plays with other packages. Distributors would like to see wider testing of their development releases, but, as your editor's recent experience shows, there are limits to how wide this testing community can be expected to be.

Although Dell didn't have much to say about Google's Chrome OS announcement last week, the PC maker is apparently looking closely at it. But for Dell--which was not listed as one of the PC makers working with Google on Chrome OS--it is just one of a number of Linux-based operating systems it is evaluating.

Hewlett-Packard Co., looking to take advantage of uncertainty surrounding the future of Sun products once it is acquired by Oracle, today unveiled a series of migration plans to entice Sparc users to switch to HP.

Bugs are a fact of life in the technology world, and the Open Source community is no exception. What is exceptional, however, is the open way these vulnerabilities are handled, as the developers behind Mozilla's Firefox browser have aptly demonstrated.

With all the recent heat generated about Mono and the C# language, it only seems appropriate to take a look at the issue from a programmer's perspective. David Siegel talks about how he came to choose C# for writing GNOME Do.

If you're coming fresh from Microsoft Excel, you might wonder where the Pivot tables are in OpenOffice.org Calc. The problem is, they're masquerading under the name of DataPilots. But, under any name, DataPilots are Calc's way of allowing you to quickly reorganize information in a range of cells so that you can gain a new insight into them. In a way, you could think of them as the spreadsheet equivalent of queries in databases. They aren't difficult to create, but they do take a little bit of thought to set up correctly.

Kenneth Wimer of the Canonical Design Team has announced that the team is seeking high quality desktop backgrounds from "anyone and everyone" for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" release. The team have created a Flickr photo group pool where users can submit or simply browse the proposed backgrounds. "Ubuntu would like to include a beautiful set of images for our users to choose from in our next release," said Wimer.

Emery Fletcher knows just as much about Google's ChromeOS, the reigning champion of blogware, as any other commentator in the whole world, and generously shares his baseless insightful insights with a grateful audience.

Skip-free audio and video playback is a fundamental expectation for many - if not most - Linux users. Given the importance of this feature and the increase in hardware performance over the years, one would think that the audio latency problem would have been solved some time ago. The recent posting of (and mixed reception for) the "RealtimeKit" mechanism shows that this issue remains open, though, and that we are still short of a consensus on how it should be solved.

The Luxembourg security specialists G-SEC have published details of a vulnerability in the majority of browsers which will either crash the browser or consume so much memory that it makes the computer virtually unusable. The trick is simple. Using JavaScript's DOM (Document Object Model), create a selection menu on the web page; a select element. Then assign to that select element's length attribute a very high value, as a result there is a continuous allocation of memory. The length attribute specifies the number of menu items the select element should contain, and according to the specification (and common sense) should be read only, but in many cases, it is writeable.

At the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Amarok developers Bart Cerneels and Nikolaj Hald Nielsen gave a talk about how a community-developed Free Software project like Amarok can work with businesses in a way that benefited both, without compromising on the spirit or openness of the project. One of the things that was touched upon was the recent release of the Palm Pre smartphone which relies on Apple's iTunes software for synchronising music with a computer. An interesting question asked was what would happen if Apple decided to block the Pre from using iTunes. Now, just over a week later, this is exactly what happened. Apple has indeed blocked the Pre from using iTunes with its latest update.

The inaugural meeting of the Online Gaming High Scalability Special Interest Group was a one day conference on the theme of "Should you bet on the Cloud". From the users point of view, an online gaming system seems simple but behind the scenes there is a high level of complexity, from ensuring response times, handling hundreds, thousands or more clients, ensuring the reliability of the entire system and managing the security of a system which may be handling virtual or real money. The question asked by the conference was can "The Cloud" help address those issues. The 180 conference attendees came from a wide range of businesses, from the obvious online bookies, poker and other game oriented companies to banks and financial institutions who have similar issues.