Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It's easy for people to pick at Windows for being prone to virus and malware attacks. It's almost a given belief that if you're running a PC with a Windows operating system, you're much more susceptible to attacks than users with other operating systems. But let's quickly look at the reasons for this. First, it isn't really Microsoft's fault. It isn't that Windows is technically inferior, it's that the majority of the world runs on Windows. This fact alone is very attractive for any virus coder or exploiter. As a virus writer, you'd want to attack the majority, not the minority.

[Hmm..are you sure it's just five? - Scott]

The good people over at Novell must be wondering what to do next after Red Hat and Microsoft inked a deal on server virtualisation interoperability yesterday. What will hit Novell really hard is the fact that Red Hat has not had to bend over as Novell itself did in 2006; there are no patent clauses in this deal at all, no question of money changing hands. In sharp contrast to the hush-hush nature of the Novell-Microsoft deal, Red Hat has clearly outlined the details of what its agreement with Redmond involves.

The Thunderbird email client is not a flashy showoff. However, it is a solid, reliable email client, it is not a malware magnet like MS Outlook, and it runs on both Linux and Windows. Migrating from Outlook to Thunderbird is a very sensible thing to do. It requires jumping through a few hoops; Eric Geier is your faithful guide in this two-part howto.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are now providing a way for web site developers to specify a preferred URL for any piece of content on a web site. The problem has been that sites may, legitimately, have the same content on different URLs. This causes problems for search engines which can't easily differentiate between these duplications. Now, a new type of "canonical" link reference can allow a page to express the preferred URL for a search engine to use.

Parted Magic has been updated to version 3.6 and includes bug fixes, updates and a number of new programs. Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with 128MB of RAM. File systems supported include ntfs, fat, reiserfs, reiser4 and hfs+. LVM and RAID are also supported. The update to the open source live CD collection of hard disk management tools "offers a major overhaul in the way Parted Magic boots and behaves."

Last year, I decided to give Linux a try. Everything was going well, until I started working for a company that uses Microsoft Outlook for e-mail. There's simply no straightforward, reliable way to run Outlook on Linux. I tried Outlook Web Access, but the service strips code from HTML attachments, among other limitations. (The company I worked for prior to my current employer used Lotus Notes, which is probably the only e-mail program in the world more proprietary than Outlook. Organizations must get some huge benefit from using these closed e-mail systems, because they sure make life difficult for users.)

Earlier this year, Freescale announced it would enter the netbook market with its own set of chips based on the ARM architecture, claiming they would yield better battery life than the Atom-based netbooks of today. The company gave a little more info today, and among other things, they want to support Google's Android on their netbooks.

Open source technology has a role in aiding Singapore's quest to become a hotbed for the creation of innovative products and services, according to a senior government official. Through its 10-year Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) masterplan, Singapore seeks to create an environment where its people, the private and public sectors can collaborate on innovative next-generation ICT products and services, said Tan Geok Leng, CTO of the country's Infocomm Development Authority (IDA).

Popular musical artists including Peter Buck of REM and Youssou N’Dour are part of a new project to raise funds to put open source software tools in the hands of African doctors. Partnering with Grammy Award-winning artist N’Dour, global non-profit IntraHealth International is releasing a charity album called OPEN Remix. Artists on the album have donated remixes of N’Dour’s Wake Up song as part of the project.

For a long time now Microsoft has insisted that potential partners recognise its patent portfolio before signing interoperability agreements. But now Microsoft has stepped out of that box and signed an interoperability agreement with Red Hat that excludes any mention of patents. The agreement is aimed at improving interoperability between the two companies’ virtualisation products. The companies will join each other’s certification and validation programmes as well as provide technical support for mutual customers, as part of the agreement.

With about a month having passed since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal", the first alpha development release to its successor is now available. Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 "Selbu" will focus on a number of underlying improvements and further polishing from where Tydal was left off. There will also be quite a bit of preparatory work for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. Selbu is expected for release in the second quarter of 2009.

When we were in college, my wife (then, girlfriend) had the best answering machine greeting message, ever. When people called her, the answering machine would answer, “Hello?” and wait. Invariably, the caller would start talking as though they had actually reached a live person. They'd be talking about last weeks assignments, or a party next week. Then the other shoe would drop.

When announcing Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Mark Shuttleworth had hoped to make this next Ubuntu Linux release perform better and to boot "blindingly quick", in particular with Ubuntu beginning to appear on more mobile devices. Well, with Alpha 4 have been released earlier this month, are Canonical developers and the community in the right direction with making Ubuntu 9.04 boot quickly? We have boot-time benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 9.04 work along with Linux desktop benchmarks comparing it to its predecessor, Ubuntu 8.10.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest story of the past week was the release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 'Lenny'. After nearly two years of continuous development and a controversial vote or two, we finally get the chance to take a quick look at the finished product - the new live media as well as the 'netinst' network installation CD. In other news, Ubuntu announces that Jaunty will ship with Linux kernel 2.6.28, Wiley publishes OpenSolaris Bible and makes three sample chapters available for free download, openSUSE's Zypper gains Bash-completion improvements, Red Hat publishes a 'State of the Union' address, the Woof project releases version 0.0.0 with support for Arch Linux, and Cuba develops their own Gentoo-based variant distribution called Nova. Also in this issue are links to two interviews - the first with Steve MacIntyre, the head of the Debian project, and the second with Scott Ritchie, an Ubuntu community developer.

When it comes to open-source communities, individuals are much better citizens than institutions. The enlightened self-interest that causes individuals to send back bug fixes, contribute ideas for new features and write documentation is much harder to find in institutions. This week, the JargonSpy analyzes why such a gap exists and what can be done about it.

Virtualization on the server is being hyped until we're sick of hearing about it. But virtualization on the desktop is very useful for a lot of different uses: development, making screenshots for howtos, testing, having access to applications without rebooting, and many more. Matt Hartley compares VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels, and several other virtualization candidates, and their fitness for the desktop user.

The venerable Debian Linux distribution has experienced a significant new release with its latest update, dubbed Lenny. While Debian is still not the easiest Linux distro to install and use, Lenny makes significant leaps forward and remains one of the most powerful Linux options. Many Linux newcomers stick with popular distros like Ubuntu or Fedora and feel intimidated by the likes of Debian. As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'".

LXer Feature: 16-Feb-2009

We start off this week's Roundup with a blast from the past with an article that compared the best Linux distributions of 2000. Its amazing just how far we have come since then. Amazon has unveiled a new slimmer Kindle reader that has more storage and quicker page turns. Priced at a somewhat steep $359, it will keep many who would want to buy it from being able too.

Adobe and Nokia are offering developers a Google-size pile of cash as incentive to write applications for Flash Player and AIR running across different types of devices. The companies today unveil a $10m fund to assist development and marketing of applications that further the Open Screen Project. They are making the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

There are many fantastic Open Source projects out there. But just how do they get the funding they need to continue and expand development? Earlier this week I posted: Why 100% Free Software Destroys Linux. That post, in a nutshell, says : Open Source projects need a way to be funded. Commercial/Proprietary software is the way it has been done so far, and is the way it is likely to be done for the foreseeable future.