Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q1 2007, covering January, February and March 2007. Topics covered include the KDE PIM Meeting at Osnabrück in January 2007, progress on the Copyright Assignment (Fiduciary Licence Agreement) and reports from the Marketing Working Group, Human Computer Interaction Working Group, and Sysadmin Team. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join KDE e.V.

There is no doubt that 3 February 1998 was a historic day. For it was then, at a meeting in Mountain View, that a small group led by Eric Raymond came up with the term “open source” as an alternative to the description “free software”. The question is, will history count 21 June 2007 as another such pivotal moment – the day that Open Source 2.0 was born?

Organizations of all sizes need to mitigate the risk of insider threats. Misconduct by authorized users represents a grave threat to an organization. According to the 2005 Computer Security Institute and Federal Bureau of Investigation Computer Crime and Security Survey, organizations reported that computer intrusions from inside sources accounted for nearly half of all incidents. You can secure your network perimeter with intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and virus scanners, but don't neglect to monitor authorized users. The Linux Audit daemon can help you detect violations of your security policies.

Honolulu based Blue Cliff, Inc. has been awarded two contracts to install and implement the VistA Electronic Medical Record System. The State of Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) awarded a contract for the installation and implementation of Blue Cliff's Open Source VistA (OS VistA) hospital information system at their Orofino, Blackfoot and Boise Idaho locations...

One of the main selling points touted by many Linux-oriented vendors is stability. Once a customer buys a subscription for an "enterprise" Linux or embedded systems product, the vendor will fix bugs in the software but otherwise keep it stable. The value for customers is that they can put these supported distributions into important parts of their operations (or products) secure in the knowledge that their supplier will provide updates which keep the system bug-free and secure without breaking things. This business model predates Linux by many years, but, as the success of certain companies shows, there is still demand for this sort of service.

Last week we learned how to create and use an encrypted, password-protected hard-drive partition usingcryptsetup-luks. Today we're going to learn how to mount it automatically at boot, how to encrypt a USB stick, and some slick password-management hacks.

If you visited the Plasma project's outdated Web site in past weeks, you might have gotten the impression that the team behind the project to revitalize the KDE desktop hasn't been up to much these past months. Delve into KDE's SVN repository, mailing lists, or the mind of lead developer Aaron Seigo, however, and you'll find a more exciting story.

Today enterprise users have two new choices in desktop distributions. Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0 is an all-new version of Mandriva's enterprise workstation, while White Box Enterprise Linux 4 Respin 2 incorporates the recent OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice.org 2 updates.

Some good ideas are too good for this world. Is this one of them?

[Sowing the seeds of despair, nice try Mike. - Scott]

A free Flash viewer is one of the last major gaps in GNU/Linux desktop functionality, so last week's news that Gnash, the free Flash player, had reached the stage where it could play YouTube and Lulu.tv videos seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was.

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Corporate Desktop 4.0, the brand new version of its enterprise-dedicated work station.

Last week, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held at the Googleplex, some of Linux's top kernel developers discussed the state of the Linux kernel today, and where it might be going. Among the kernel developers present were Andrew Morton, James Bottomley, Chris Wright, Ted T'so, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. About the only top Linux kernel developer who wasn't present was Linus Torvalds, the originator of the kernel.

The Flock project has been building a"social Web browser" since 2005. The upcoming Flock 0.9 release adds new blogging features, integrates media streams into the browser, and includes an overhaul of the Flock bookmark system. It's not perfect yet, but Flock 0.9 is a big leap forward.

After a number of years of public hibernation, Freemed-YiRC is out with a new release, Beta0.99. This is expected to be the last release before V1.00. Freemed-YiRC has been developed with Ohio's agencies in mind, however it is modular and can be adapted to other states/countries.

When I first saw the list for the eWEEK slide show, Ten Reasons Not to Buy Open Source, I couldn't believe what I was reading. So here are my answers to these "reasons."

Server-monitoring firm's research claims Apache-based websites benefit from faster load time and greater uptime than those based on Windows.

The CA-Browser forum, a group of leading Certificate Authorities and web browser developers, has approved the first version of Extended Validation certificates for use with web browser and other applications to certify a higher level of identity verification. This is a great step forward for security and trust on the web, and KDE is proud to have been a part of the process from the beginning to the end.

In another thread discussing the tracking of kernel regressions [story], Linux creator Linus Torvalds noted that the kernel is evolving so quickly it is inevitable that bugs will be introduced. He used a git query to determine that there are an average of over 65 patches being committed every single day, "that translates to five hundred commits a week, two _thousand_ commits per month, and 25 thousand commits per year. As a fairly constant stream. Will mistakes happen? Hell *yes*." He continued on to add, "and I'd argue that any flow that tries to 'guarantee' that mistakes don't happen is broken. It's a sure-fire way to just frustrate people, simply because it assumes a level of perfection in maintainers and developers that isn't possible

Organizers of OpenOffice.org Conference 2007, set for Sept. 19 through 21 in Barcelona, today released a draft of the program schedule for the event. Facilities will be provided for individual project organizers to hold separate meetings on the afternoon of Sept. 18, a team spokesperson said.

The Damn Small Linux (DSL) project team on June 19 announced the availability of the first release candidate of the next version of its live CD mini-distribution based on Debian Linux. Damn Small Linux 3.4 features a 2.4.26 kernel and a lightweight Fluxbox desktop environment, the team said.