Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Over the last few months, open source has gained momentum at Stanford University in the form of the Stanford Open Source Lab. Inspired by groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, Openflows Community Technology Lab, and MIT’s Open Course Ware, a few people at Stanford decided to band together and dedicate their time and energies to the development of free/open/libre learning and knowledge resources.

When Firefox 2.12 came out on Feb. 7, it brought with it fixes for three critical security holes and seven that were not quite so serious. According to the security advisories, many of these problems were also fixed in the Thunderbird 2.12 e-mail client. Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbird 2.12. The Mozilla Foundation's press release focused on the Firefox 2.12 security fixes. The Foundation also reported, though, in its MFSA (Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory), that these same bugs had been fixed in the fictitious Thunderbird 2.12.

Saturday, January 19th 2008, will mark the 30 year countdown to the Y2K38 wraparound of regular 32-bit UNIX time. UNIX internal time is stored in a data structure using a long int, containing the number of seconds since 1970. On a 32-bit machine this value is sufficient to store time up to the 18th of January 2038. After this date 32-bit clocks will overflow and return false values.

Xfce is just as customisable as KDE or GNOME, so I set myself a goal: make Xubuntu look like Windows Vista. Why? Because I can.

The Strigi project is the core of the index and search technology for KDE 4. Strigi is designed to be small and fast, and it can be installed and used with or without KDE 4, as we'll see. Strigi uses plugins to handle its indices, filetypes, and metadata extraction. Currently the filesystem index can be stored in SQLite 3, Xapian, CLucene and Hyper Estraier. The filetype plugins allow Strigi to get at the text content of non plain text files, such as PDF or office file formats. The metadata extraction plugins can tell Strigi information about files -- for example, the ID3 metadata tags from audio files.

The ultimate collection of cheat sheets for linux users. Enough to fill up your whole wall with commands yielded by the geek gods! Be sure to digg this so more people can have the opportunity to get ahold of all these in one place.

[How cool is this? Everything I need to make myself look smart, all in one place. :-) - Scott]

Steve Ballmer still wants to swallow Jerry Yang. Just a few hours after Yahoo! rejected Microsoft's $44.6bn purchase offer, the Redmond-based software giant has responded, reiterating that it "reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

Faxes are the technology that won't die. Having become popular in the 1970s, they persist in modern business, despite being redundant and needlessly complicated. Increasingly, fax capacity has been transferred online, often via office suites. In keeping with this norm, OpenOffice.org offers everything you need to fax from within it, but you do need to do some configuration both inside and outside OpenOffice.org before you can use the office suite for faxing.

Trend Micro might insist that its patent case against Barracuda Networks isn't about free software -- but try telling that to the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Since Barracuda Networks went public about the case last month, it has heard from "a tremendous number of individuals" according to Dean Drako, Barracuda's president and CEO. Even more significantly, announcement of the case has led to a boycott against Trend Micro.

The sixth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) kicked off in Los Angeles on Friday with four specialized conference tracks. General talks and the expo floor both began Saturday, but attendees who braved the chilly 70-degree California weather a day early were rewarded with lessons in open source far removed from the typical desktop Linux fare.

Every geek needs a large power-hungry supercomputer, right? Wrong. French company Linutop offers a tiny machine - the Linutop - no bigger than a mid-sized paperback novel. Weighing a mere 250 grams, this machine will make cleaning your desk a breeze.

The ASUS Eee PC comes pre-loaded with Xandros Linux, an operating system far less susceptible to viruses, spyware, malware and the other nasties that are almost of biblical proportions in the Windows world. So, even though ASUS makes a Windows XP driver disc to allow the easy installation of XP, and is due to start selling the Eee with XP pre-loaded, is XP worth the worry?

Firefox rocks because it acts like a Lego set -- you have your base module, and then you can stick extensions on it. Some of the most obvious extensions are toolbars. Unlike the embedded-application extensions like Chatzilla or FireFTP, toolbars actually modify your interface. A toolbar can contain search engine interfaces, bookmarks, RSS feeds, or extra tools for managing content. A lot of toolbars are very specialized -- tools for multimedia producers, musicians, and even Mormon theology students. Here are three more general toolbars that any net junkie will find useful.

How much are Yahoo's volunteers worth? And how much less will Yahoo be worth if Microsoft scares them away? That's the question that should be at the center of talk about Yahoo's value — both as an acquisition for Microsoft and as good company to work for with.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server both use the Xen virtualization software, a "hypervisor" layer that lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer. In contrast, the KVM software runs on top of a version of Linux, the "host" operating system that provides a foundation for other "guest" operating systems to run in a virtual mode.

LXer Feature: 10-Feb-2008

This weeks Roundup has several sections this week for your reading pleasure, Linus gets quoted a lot, Microsoft cuts off access to old formats, Is MS Office adware?, Google chimes in on the Microsoft- Yahoo merger plus more. KDE 4.0.1 hits the streets, How to boot Linux in less than 40 seconds and in our FUD section a voice in the dark proclaims there is no year of the Linux desktop. Look for a SCALE roundup tomorrow where I will have pictures and a collection of SCALE related articles.

Bruce Perens doesn't regret the fact that, since officially co-birthing open source with The Cathedral and the Bazaar author and hacker Eric Raymond ten years ago, Linux and open source have moved from the sandal-wearing fringes to acceptance by Wall Street and big, closed-source industry giants.

Run by the organizers of the CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference, the competition is a repeat of the "PWN to Own" contest at CanSecWest in 2007, when security researchers competed to win a MacBook Pro and US$10,000. The prize was shared between security researchers Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macauley for their successful use of a zero-day QuickTime vulnerability, which they used to compromise the MacBook. The vulnerability was subsequently found to also affect Windows platforms.

Another week has slipped by with a good handful of Linux releases being announced. In case you missed them the first time around here again are some of the more interesting: OpenSuse released a second alpha version of the forthcoming OpenSuse 11.0.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Custom legend entries and the beginnings of the Mercator map projection (and evidence of exciting other things to come) in Marble. Support for multiple online dictionaries and the start of a vocabulary Plasma applet in Parley. Kross scripting engines (supporting various scripting languages) in Plasma, and the much-anticipated return of the ability to resize the panel. Support for multiple "Picture of the Day" providers in the "Picture Frame" Plasma applet. More work on the redesign (code and visuals) of KWorldClock. Work on theming improvements across KDE games. Image information now displayed in fullscreen mode in Gwenview.