Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Garmin has posted Linux source code for its Nuvi 8xx and Nuvi 5xxx-series GPS navigation devices. The Nuvi 8xx offers a 4.3-inch, 480x272 display, and appears to be based on a Marvell PXA-3xx processor, Gnome Mobile Linux, and GeoClue location technology.

Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community.

Microsoft is preparing a new bid for Yahoo's search business and has approached other media companies about joining it in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo's breakup, The Wall Street Journal said. Microsoft has already held talks with Time Warner and News Corp. among others, the paper quoted people familiar with the talks as saying.

Kismet is a wireless "detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system," and one of the growing list of essential open source tools for computer network security professionals. Kismet runs on any POSIX-compliant platform, including Windows, Mac OS X, and BSD, but Linux is the preferred platform because it has more unencumbered RFMON-capable drivers than any of the others. Monitor mode ability is critical to fully utilizing Kismet, because it allows Kismet to examine all the packets it can hear, not just those of whatever access point (AP) -- if any -- you are currently associated with. Almost as important to police, intelligence agencies, and black hat hackers is the fact that it allows Kismet to work passively, intercepting and collecting packets without leaving any fingerprints of its own behind.

Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications. Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications, such as errors that could allow a cross-site scripting attack or cause caching problems.

IOzone lets you benchmark your filesystem performance, seeing how well record IO occurs for files of various sizes. With IOzone you can see more detailed information than the read, write, and rewrite figures that Bonnie++ reports. IOzone is great at detecting areas where file IO might not be performing as well as expected. IOzone is available for openSUSE 10.3 as a 1-Click install, in multiverse for Ubuntu Hardy, and is in the standard Fedora 9 repositories.

Guinness World Records has validated Mozilla's attempt to set a record for the number of software downloads in a 24 hour period. The official count of Firefox 3 downloads was 8,002,530.

Do you remember the massive press orgy a year ago when One Laptop Per Nigerian Child debuted at L.E.A. Primary School Galadima in Abuja Model Village? How the great Foreign God held high his gift of knowledge to the poor dark-skinned children of Africa, and OLPC proclaimed: "All of a sudden, School Galadima has gone from the age-old chalk-and-board teaching technology to the avant-garde one-laptop-per-child XO technology with cutting-edge features." Well let us take a look at the lessons a year of Nigeria has taught One Laptop Per Child.

Last week, Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, stated in an interview that much of the current animosity from the open source community toward Sun has its origins in the way Sun used to treat the community. Phipps, being his usual straightforward self, phrased it as Sun "screwed up," a quote guaranteed to make headlines, which it did.

AMD has released faster new ATI Catalyst drivers for Linux customers of its ATI FireGL professional graphics cards. The 8.49.7 Linux driver provides 33 percent faster OpenGL performance than the previous driver, claims the company.

Linspire is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Xandros. The companies had been talking about a deal for some time, and they became more serious toward the end of last year, according to Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos. The acquisition, he said, will help Xandros expand in both the mobile and enterprise Linux spaces.

For Louis Landry, a member of the core team for the Joomla! management system, free and open source software (FOSS) is not just a hobby, nor just the technology behind Jxtended, the consulting business in which he is a partner. For Landry, FOSS is also the movement that gave him direction in life, and provides both the rationale and the outlet for his diverse interests. In fact, he is so enthusiastic about FOSS that he sounds like an evangelist for the community whenever it is mentioned.

Apple Inc.'s operating system market share has increased by nearly 32% in the last year, according to data collected by an Internet metrics company. Last month, Apple's Mac OS X accounted for 7.94% of the operating systems powering computers that accessed the 40,000 Web sites Net Applications monitors for its clients, the company reported yesterday. A year ago, Mac OS X's usage share stood at 6.03%. Also showing gains in June were Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista and Linux, which climbed 8% and 18%, respectively, to end the month accounting for 16.14% and 0.88% of the online operating system market.

OpenMoko will start selling its Linux-based Neo FreeRunner phone online on July 4th, says the company. Billed as a completely open source, hackable hardware platform, the Neo FreeRunner will receive updated software with new location-based applications in August, says OpenMoko.

Anti-Linux evangelists try to level many claims against the free open source operating system Linux. Arguments against the base cost (nothing!) or about the turnaround time to repair security exploits don’t work. But there is one item in the anti-Linux arsenal which often hits hard: lack of support. Here's why it makes good Linux techies groan when they see it.

The already vicious lawsuit involving Barracuda Networks and Trend Micro that is currently in discovery in front of the American International Trade Commission (ITC) just turned nastier. Barracuda has filed its own patent infringement claim against Trend Micro, based upon three recently acquired patents. The suit is in response to Trend Micro's allegation that its patent is being infringed by Barracuda shipping Clam Antivirus (ClamAV), the popular free software application, and appears designed to pressure Trend Micro to reach a negotiated settlement. "It's unfortunate that we have to spend time and energy and money doing this BS legal stuff when we could be spending that time and money and energy making the Internet a safer place," says Dean Drako, Barracuda's president and CEO. "It makes you sad."

Microsoft Corp. will begin selling its Office programs to consumers on a subscription basis starting mid-July, in a bid to reach thrifty PC buyers who would otherwise pass on productivity software. The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year.

A commercial RTOS and tools provider will host an event for embedded Linux developers on August 6th, during the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. "Wind River Developer Day" will offer sessions on the mobile device market and Carrier Grade virtualization, along with Wind River product tutorials and demos.

Yesterday I discussed the Bonnie++ tool, which can be used to benchmark filesystem performance. When you are tweaking a RAID and filesystem combination, you generally want to see whether your changes work in a positive manner across the board, and by how much. I created a utility called bonnie-to-chart to show the results of multiple Bonnie++ runs in either absolute or relative performance terms. It's primarily a Perl script that can be used together with the Open Flash Chart component.

The Institute for Justice has filed a lawsuit on behalf of computer repair guy Mike Rife against the Texas Private Security Bureau (PSB) arguing that a new law unconstitutionally denies computer repair companies the right to work in their chosen profession. This based around the Texas Constitution which protects the right of Texans to earn an honest living without unreasonable government interference.

[Not FOSS related but I thought it would be of interest - Scott]