Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Specially crafted DHCP servers can take control of a PC if the PC is running the DHCP client supplied by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) (dhclient). This is the default set-up in Ubuntu, BSD and many other Linux distributions. According to an ISC advisory, the vulnerability is based on a buffer overflow that allows attackers to inject arbitrary code into a system and execute it at root level. The buffer overflow can be triggered in the script_write_params method using excessively long server-supplied subnet masks.

One of the GNOME projects that's in development that should premiere around the time of GNOME 3.0 is Zeitgeist, which is the system for tracking user activity and events and then logging it, so that later on the user can use the Zeitgeist tool to browse or find events and files on the computer. This project is described by the Zeitgeist developers as, "You worked on a file, but you cannot remember where you saved it? You visited a web page about basketball three days ago, but you cannot find the URL in your browser's history? No problem, this is where Zeitgeist enters the scene...

Google’s announcement last week concerning its plans to bring out a fully fledged operating system was inevitably going to put the cat amongst the twitterati. “Let’s see,” asked the pundits, “who else makes operating systems?” Of course the intention was to have the Microsoft marketing monster shaking in its boots, not least to stave off a similar intent by the latter as it launches a number of online services of its own.

There are a number of ways to extract a range of pages from a PDF file: there are PDF related toolkits for doing it, or you can use Ghostscript directly.

Mozilla has acknowledged that there is a critical JavaScript vulnerability in its Firefox 3.5 web browser and has confirmed that it's currently working on an update to address the problem. As a workaround, Mozilla advises users to disable the Just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compiler. To do so, users must first enter about:config into the browsers location bar and then set the javascript.options.jit.content setting value to "false". When making changes to the about:config settings, users will first see a warning message stating that "This might void your warranty" and that changes to the advanced settings can be harmful to the stability, security and performance of Firefox. To continue users must click a button marked "I'll be careful I promise!".

In the past three months, Oracle's acquisition Sun lost over one billion dollars in revenue. The spring of 2008 had stood at $3.8 billion, while the figure for 2009 was $2.6 billion. The loss was about 10 cents per share, with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) adjusting the loss to 30 cents per share. Sun's preliminary quarterly report falls short because the company wants to migrate its results into the annual report in August, their fiscal year having ended June 30.

The race to fast boot times is on, with MontaVista making the latest headlines. The embedded Linux vendor announced in the United States Tuesday its latest system is able to boot in one second, and released a video demonstrating a vehicle dashboard system going from cold boot into a "fully operational" state in that time.

It's getting to where a fellow can't enjoy a nice relaxing boot time these days. The latest perpetrator of the conspiracy: Linux application tool vendor MontaVista, which said today that it is demonstrating an embedded Linux system that boots in just one second. MontaVista's Linux demo goes from a cold boot into a sample, "fully operational" vehicle dashboard application in a single second, the company said. It will be showing off the speedy boot performance at the Virtual Freescale Technology Forum this week.

In 1996 when KDE was first announced, it had only a handful of developers and the project could manage the source code without using a revision control system. More and more developers have begun to contribute to KDE over the years, and while there has been some attrition, the total number of active developers working on KDE has been steadily growing. In order to get a pulse from the current developer community, Simon St. James and Arthur Schiwon produced and plotted two basic metrics that show the continued growth within the KDE community.

A group called PlanetWatt has released a Beta 3 version of a new lightweight, power-sipping distro based on Ubuntu. The low-power WattOS is built from scratch using the Ubuntu MinimalCD and Ubuntu 9.04, and uses the lightweight LXDE environment and OpenBox, says the group.

Akademy 2009 was held as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria last week. During the week the KDE community attended conference presentations and was engaged in meetings, informal discussions and of course a great deal of coding. This article provides an overview of what's happening in the KDE universe and what can be expected for the future.

Recent early development releases of the popular distributions provide a preview of what's to come, while some lesser known distributions reach new milestones. A new version of the KDE desktop is due by the end of the month.

A new legal journal has been launched that deals specifically with issues around free and open source software. The "International Free and Open Source Software Law Review" (IFOSSLR) is a bi-annual peer reviewed publication. The editorial committee is made up of members of the European Legal Network, a group of legal experts founded by the Free Software Foundation Europe in 2007.

Google followed up on Thursday's announcement of a Linux-based Chrome OS for netbooks by listing nine technology partners that are supporting the open-source platform. Meanwhile, one report claims that Intel, which is not on the list, is collaborating with Google on Chrome OS.

LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2009

Phoenix Technologies announced that its fast-boot "HyperSpace" technology is now "aligned" with the Moblin project and that it will work with Intel to promote the technologies to netbook and nettop OEMs and ODMs. HyperSpace will improve the Linux-based Moblin stack's already considerable capabilities for fast-boot and power management, says Phoenix.

Mark Shuttleworth has suggested that the next Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu Linux may be delayed. The expectation was that the next LTS version would be 10.04, due for release in April 2010, but in an interview with derStandard.at, Shuttleworth says "The LTS will be either 10.04 or 10.10 - based on a conversation that is going on right now betweeen Debian and Ubuntu".

Microsoft plays to win. As a result, it seems to regard any legal means as justified, and sometimes even strays outside the law, as the US anti-trust case demonstrated. In the context of marketplace rough-and-tumble, such aggressiveness is perhaps acceptable, but in other realms, there may be serious collateral damage. A good example of where that is the case is Microsoft's behaviour during the OOXML standardisation process at the ISO.

The BBC has begun working on a series of four one-hour documentaries for its BBC Two channel about how the web has, and still is, changing our lives. The current working title for the open and collaborative documentary series is the "Digital Revolution". According to a post on the Digital Revolution Blog, the goal of the project is to open up the production process as much as possible by asking for advice and stories from online users and by sharing as many of the production teams thoughts and ideas as possible.

Google's Chrome OS isn't the first operating system to challenge Microsoft Windows' commanding lead. But it's got an advantage that other rivals such as Linux lacked: the Web. Any new operating system must attract the developers who produce the applications to make it useful. The trouble Windows challengers have had is matching the wide spectrum of software available for Windows already.