Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the main reasons people move from Windows to Linux is the promise of greater security from malware on the Internet. Everyone knows you need to add extra security to try to keep a Windows desktop safe, but what do you have to do to accomplish the same thing on Linux? To answer that question, we asked a number of well-known Linux kernel hackers and a security expert for their thoughts on the matter.

What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all. Or have we?

This article provides an overview of Linux-based tools for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including a quick take on the ESRI's ArcReader. Future articles will explore this and other individual tools in greater depth.

Tomorrow, January 26th, Gareth Greenaway, SCALE Operations Chair, and Orv Beach, SCALE Publicity Chair, will be on the Digital Village radio show. Digital Village is carried on KPFK (90.7 FM in the Los Angeles area), and streaming audio at http://www.kpfk.org.

This week Richard Seibt, the final CEO of an independent SUSE, held his third Open Source Meets Business Congress in Nurnberg, Germany -- birthplace of SUSE. Seibt says the event plays host to 720 people, 60% of whom identify themselves as "c-level decision makers" and 20% of whom say they are "IT professionals." The Congress lasted three days. The first day was the Investment Summit, intended to instruct attendees on "why to invest in open source," and featuring keynotes from venture capitalist Larry Augustin and IBM's Bob Sutor.

UNetbootin is a simple open source tool that allows you to install a variety of distributions over the Internet, without burning a CD. The Wubi tool for installing Ubuntu this way has been around for a while, but unlike UNetbootin, Wubi installs Ubuntu on a file stored in a Windows environment and creates no actual partitions. UNetbootin will create a partitioned dual-boot system as though you installed with a CD. It's useful if you're working on a machine with a slow or no CD/DVD drive or don't have any spare discs to burn.

Inspired by the command wheel in the Neverwinter Nights online game, Kommando is a floating command panel for KDE. Although Kommando's development is almost as slow as an official Debian release, and is only at version 0.5.2, it is already a configurable and convenient addition to the array of panels available in KDE.

This year will see Linux gain a stronger foothold as an enterprise platform in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as steady growth in mobile-commerce, a market report revealed. In its study released Wednesday, Canadian-based research house XMG gave its top eight predictions and trends that will impact the region in 2008.

It has been said that the most important missing killer app for Linux is a free Adobe Photoshop clone. In this series we'll correct that assertion, and then move on to bringing high-quality digital images to life in Linux itself, without having to use icky old Windows, or spending a pot of money.

Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media -- typically thought to be at odds with each other.

Applications can ask the Linux kernel to report changes to selected files and directories. I created the Kernel Filesystem Monitoring Daemon (kfsmd) to make monitoring filesystem changes simple. There are packages available for both 32- and 64-bit Fedora 7 and 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy, as well as 32-bit packages for openSUSE 10.3. You can also download a repo file, which can be used with Fedora 8 and yum. Placing the repo file into /etc/yum.repos.d allows you to install kfsmd and its dependencies with yum install kfsmd on a Fedora 8 machine. You can also compile directly from source if that is your preference.

According to a press release issued earlier this month by Finjan, a security research firm, compromised Web servers are infecting thousands of visitors daily with malware that turns their Windows machines into unwitting bots to do the bidding of an as yet unidentified criminal organization. Security firms ScanSafe and SecureWorks have since added their own takes on the situation, though with varying estimates on the number of sites affected. All reports thus far say the compromised servers are running Linux and Apache.

Hewlett-Packard is taking a giant leap into the field of open source governance -- the managing of free software within corporate systems -- with three announcements today. FOSSology, an open source project for the development of governance and FOSSBazaar, a Web site to focus discussion about governance, are being development with open source corporate partners, while the Open Source Health Check is the name for HP's own collection of governance consulting services.

Last week, we began a multi-part series looking at the soon-to-be ten years of LWN. At the end of that episode, we were coming to the realization that the training business was, perhaps, not going to perform quite as well as our spreadsheets had suggested it might. It turns out that spreadsheets created with free software can be just as deceptive as those done with proprietary programs - who would have ever guessed? So we decided to look into whether it might be possible to make some sort of deal with some other company - preferably one with some money - to keep the show going.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has completed the bulk import of comprehensive street and highway data for the United States, months ahead of the project's original estimates. The massive data set originated with the US Census Bureau's public domain map database, and importing it required a dedicated upload process running around the clock since August 2007. The imported data will still require human editing and error-correction, but the completed task is a major milestone for the OSM project.

Etelos, launched in pre-bubble 1999 as a CRM services outfit, has remade itself as a Web 2.0 company with the help of open source software. Today, Etelos offers hosted CRM applications that weave into Google apps, Windows Live, and even iPods. Leaving Microsoft behind, and all the licensing restrictions that came with it, made all the difference, says CTO and founder Danny Kolke.

FUDCon Raleigh 2008 was a weekend of hacking, planning, discussions, coding, and general mirth. Over 200 members of the Fedora community were in attendance, and a tremendous amount of work was accomplished that will pay off in the Fedora 9 release. Rather than recap the entire event myself, I have collected up some of the blog posts about FUDCon that appeared on Fedora Planet during and after the event. Check back tomorrow for a FUDCon video.

Open source content management systems (CMS) come in various shapes and sizes and can manage everything from your blog to your enterprise. These systems aren't difficult to deploy, but if you don't know your Apache from your MySQL, you'll run into a steep learning curve. If you have a deadline staring at you, or just want to get a CMS up and running as fast as possible, hop over to BitNami, a site that packages ready-to-consume "stacks" of popular open source CMSes. Just grab your favorite one, double-click, and you're done!

The Apache Web server (Apache) comes with a powerful logging framework. In the default configuration, Apache logs all errors to an error log and all access requests to an access log. The default level of logging is sufficient for analyzing traffic patterns and for getting basic information about errors, but it may be inadequate for troubleshooting purposes. Familiarity with all the logging features can help you troubleshoot the Web server or applications hosted on Apache.

Linux laptop users suffering from Apple MacBook Air envy now have a chic, hot laptop to call their own: the Dell XPS 1330n with pre-installed Ubuntu 7.10. On Jan. 23, Dell quietly announced that it was releasing the Dell XPS 1330n to the European market. In addition, for the first time, Dell is allowing its customers in Spain to order this and other PCs with pre-loaded Ubuntu Linux. The Ubuntu-equipped XPS 1330 will be available to North American customers the first week of the February.