Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The KDE desktop team is hosting an educational conference, "Edu & School Day at aKademy 2007," in Glasgow, Scotland, on July 3. The aim of the event is to improve awareness of free software and promote its use in more educational areas, a KDE spokesperson said. The event will be held at the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.

Suddenly, every application on the desktop seems to be adding a blogging extension. Sun Microsystems' offering is the Sun Weblog Publisher (SWP) for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. SWP is easy to install and start using, but the translation between the Writer word processor and the markup language used on blogging sites is not as smooth as it should be, and the options for uploading entries are more limited than they should be.

The future of Reiser4 was raised on the lkml, with the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, awaiting his May 7'th trial. Concerns that the filesystem wasn't being maintained were laid to rest when Andrew Morton stated, "the namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to receive patches for it." He further added, "the namesys guys are responsive and play well with others." As to why the filesystem hasn't yet been merged into the 2.6 kernel, Andrew explained, "to get it unstuck we'd need a general push, get people looking at and testing the code, get the vendors to have a serious think about it, etc. We could do that - it'd require that the namesys people (and I) start making threatening noises about merging it, I guess." He then made joking reference to the recent debate regarding the new CPU schedulers, "or we could move all the reiser4 code into kernel/sched.c - that seems to get people fired up."

The PCLinuxOS Hardware Database collects user-submitted reports on the compatibility of various hardware with the PCLinuxOS distribution. Now its founder has announced a plan to begin a hardware certification program for personal computer manufacturers.

Government of the West African nation is developing an open source policy and has already implemented free software for its parliamentary systems.

The latest release of Mambo, the popular open source content management system, sees the completion of the Mambo Language Manager. With this done, users and site administrators can translate pages easily.

The alternate licensing scheme for content, Creative Commons, still has a long way to go in South Africa. Government in particular is resistant to change, risking the loss of South Africa's culture, says iCommons head Heather Ford.

On the day that support for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 was scheduled to end, an announcement has been posted on the Mozilla Developer News weblog stating that support for Firefox 1.5 has been extended until mid-May. Once support for Firefox 1.5 ends, no more 1.5.0.x security and stability updates will be released. The last such update was Firefox 1.5.0.11, which was made available on Tuesday 20th March this year. Users are strongly advised to upgrade to the latest Firefox 2 release, currently 2.0.0.3, as soon as possible.

You are invited to Akademy Edu & School Day on Tuesday 3rd July. This day will focus on installing and running free educational software in schools, presenting software as well as getting feedback from teachers and community people.

IBM has released beta software to let applications written for Linux on servers with x86 processors run in Big Blue's System p machines built with its own Power processors.

Berry Linux 0.80, a Fedora-based live CD for the desktop with support for the Japanese and English languages, was released this week by its Japan-based project team. The distribution incorporates a 2.6.20.7 kernel and includes a default KDE desktop and support for 3D desktop effects with AIGLX and Beryl 0.2.0, the team said.

California remains the fertile crescent of the US technology industry, employing more tech workers and paying higher wages than any other state.

RedHat has rejigged its JBoss offerings in a move it reckons will make it the default choice for businesses that have had enough of the proprietary world. It has also signed a deal to acquire MetaMatrix, which it will integrate into its new JBoss product set.

Rawstudio is an open source, GTK+-based RAW photo converter. It takes a straightforward approach -- no outside-the-box interface designs, no fancy frills. The result is an easy-to-use application that is stable enough for everyday usage, even though it is still undergoing constant development.

The opening keynote talk at the 2007 Embedded Linux Conference was given by Thomas Gleixner. Thomas has been a significant contributor to the kernel for some time; most recently, he is the force behind much of the high-resolution timer work which has been merged for 2.6.21. His experience with the embedded Linux industry has prompted him to put together a talk on how that industry works (or doesn't) with the development community. When things go badly, he says, the result is a true nightmare.

BackTrack is a live CD Linux distribution that focuses on penetration testing. A merger of two older security-related distros -- Whax and Auditor Security Collection -- BackTrack bundles more than 300 security tools.

Daphne Chung, research manager for infrastructure and middleware software at IDC Asia-Pacific, noted that as much as 83 percent of the US$15 billion Asia-Pacific enterprise software market is now exposed to open-source software. This includes areas such as enterprise resource management applications, customer relationship management and operating systems.

Jailing is a mechanism to virtually change a system's root directory. By employing this method, administrators can isolate services so that they cannot access the real filesystem structure. You should run unsecured and sensitive network services in a chroot jail, because if a hacker can break into a vulnerable service he could exploit your whole system. If a service is jailed, the intruder will be able to see only what you want him to see -- that is, nothing useful. Some of the most frequent targets of attack, which therefore should be jailed, are BIND, Apache, FTP, and SSH. SSHjail is a patch for the OpenSSH daemon. It modifies two OpenSSH files (session.c and version.h) and allows you to jail your SSH service without any need for SSH reconfiguration.

Learning Javascript by Shelley Powers is a good introduction to the revived world of Javascript which underpins much of Web 2.0.

Virtualization, both on the software and hardware side, took center stage at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference.