Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the things about getting older is that you learn to ignore things until you have to do something about them. It’s a learned efficiency, I suppose, rationing your increasingly precious time out to the unceasing demands upon it. I finally realized I have to do some serious thinking about cloud computing. “Hang on a minute, don’t you work at Google ?” I hear you say. Well, yes, but in my defense many of the people who work at Google don’t have anything to do with cloud computing. Some of us have to keep the conference rooms clean, write Open Source/Free Software, things of that nature.

Time Warner Cable has increased all of its Internet data caps, added some new ones, and generously offered to limit overage charges to $75/month. Perhaps that's because the company's broadband operations are actually earning more cash and have lower expenses than they did in 2007, making TWC's stated rationale for the caps less tenable.

University of Utah officials say a computer virus has infected more than 700 campus computers, including those at the school's three hospitals. University health sciences spokesman Chris Nelson said the outbreak of the Conficker worm, which can slow computers and steal personal information, was first detected Thursday. By Friday, the virus had infiltrated computers at the hospitals, medical school, and colleges of nursing, pharmacy and health.

We're used to thinking of Linux distributions being set in stone. They're either KDE or Gnome, use a certain kernel and bundle certain applications. But this doesn't have to be the case. If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it's worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we'll show you how...

I was pricing a low-end desktop computer the other day. When configuring it, I noticed that if I added a four-year warranty, it would cost more than the entire system! We've really come to the point where computer hardware is like a plastic fork. If a tine breaks off, it gets thrown away. Sadly, although throwing away plastic forks is rough on the environment, used computers are so much more so.

Intel remains committed to its mobile Linux project, it has said, despite handing over supervision to the Linux Foundation. The chip giant has pledged it will provide additional engineers and resources to refine Moblin, the project to build a ready-made Linux and hardware stack for a range of consumer devices. Despite pulling in more of its own people, though, Intel not only believes it can attract more independent participation in Mobiln. It will also use external participation to help measure Moblin's success.

When you're tracking down wayward processes and figuring out what they're doing, lsof is an indispensible command for finding all open files, and the processes that opened them. Juliet Kemp gives us some good tips on using this simple but excellent command.

Putting Linux on mobile phones is all the rage these days, what with Google's Android popping up on prototypes left and right, and even the venerable Palm pushing the Pre, a penguin-phone of its own. That wasn't always true, though, but way back in those dark days of proprietary phoning — at least a little ways back — there was Openmoko bringing us hope of truly-open telephony.

While there are great open-source games like Nexuiz and XreaL, a title many Linux gamers have been waiting years for has been Unreal Tournament 3. Prior to the game launching, a Linux client was confirmed and that famed developer/porter Ryan Gordon was porting the UT3 engine.

Building software in most languages is a pain. Remember ant build.xml, maven2 pom files, and multi-level makefiles? Python has a simple solution for building modules, applications, and extensions called distutils. Disutils comes as part of the Python distribution so there are no other packages required.

Imhad Sousou, director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, has said that Intel want to see a future version of Moblin boot within two seconds. This aim was one of the items he discussed at the Linux Collaboration Summit, in San Francisco. The recent Moblin 2 alpha has already shown a reasonably rapid boot process with most of the major components starting up within seconds, but Sousou says that Intel wants to build on this to bring the total start up time to two seconds, while retaining the full software stack.

Sharing lies at the heart of free software, and drives much of its incredible efficiency as a development methodology. It means that coders do not have to re-invent the wheel, but can borrow from pre-existing programs. Software patents, despite their name, are about locking down knowledge so that it cannot be shared without permission (and usually payment). But are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source licence? That's the question posed by a new licence that is being submitted to the Open Source Inititative (OSI) for review.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that Linux adoption is advancing two to three times faster than that of other platforms and that it will be boosted as companies consolidate their technical infrastructure during this economic downturn. Similar views were expressed by an IDC analyst who has recently authored a report which suggests that Linux will withstand the recession better than its competitors.

Plugins are not mysterious elite geek things, but rather are scripts for automating tasks that you perform frequently. They can be very simple, for example flipping an image upside-down, or as complex as you like. Akkana Peck shows us how to create a simple GIMP plugin using Python.

A vulnerability in the CIFS client in the Linux Kernel code makes it possible for a manipulated SMB server to cause users systems to crash or be compromised. The problem is caused by a buffer in the CIFSTCon function in fs/cifs/connect.c file being too small. This function is used when the server responds to a connection request for a resource, known as a Tree Connect. Overflowing the undersized buffer could allow code to be injected and executed. The bug only comes into play if the users system attempts to mount a resource on a manipulated server.

I love old technology as much as the next techno-geezer, but come on, it wasn't all wonder and goodness. After we're done reminiscing about the good old days of operating systems, let's reflect on the bad old days of operating systems as well. After all, the bad times are still with us -- even in 2009, there are still some wretched operating systems out there. In historical order, from oldest to newest, here's my own personal list of the top (bottom?) 10 OS stinkers.

Packet filtering and firewalling has a long history in Linux. The first filtering mechanism, called "ipfwadm," was released in 1995 for the 1.2.1 kernel. This code was used until the 2.2.0 stable release (January, 1999), when the new "ipchains" module took over. While ipchains was useful, it only lasted until 2.4.0 (January, 2001), when it, too, was replaced by iptables/netfilter, which remains in the kernel now. If netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy has his way, though, iptables, too, will be gone in the future, replaced by yet another mechanism called "nftables." This article will give an overview of how nftables works, followed by a discussion of the motivations behind this change.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell today announced that the openSUSE Project, which drives the development variant of its Linux, will support the creation and packaging of various Linuxes for ARM processors using the openSUSE Build Service version 1.6. According to Novell, the support for building application stacks and Linux distros for 32-bit ARM RISC processors was donated to the openSUSE community by German software company DataSoft GmbH. DataSoft has created a set of applications, called 5e, for network operators and content providers that is stacked atop the openSUSE distro.

Several months ago, I wrote how to make activity designers happy by making it easier to create simple learning activities using popular software development tools, particularly for the Sugar learning environment. Back then, I concluded that Adobe's Flash player and Flex libraries were the proper tools for this purpose. I was wrong. Adobe's flash and flex are great tools but they will never form the basis of a thriving ecosystem of open-source educational software. This is because Adobe's flash files are distributed in binary format, an immediate disincentive to sharing the source code.

Sun has added support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to the latest version of its "open source" desktop virtualization software. Other enhancements to VirtualBox 2.2 (left) include greater hypervisor optimization and 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications, says an eWEEK story.