Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When it comes to choosing a Linux distribution, people tend to stick with the major players, such as Ubuntu, SUSE, or Fedora. However, every once in a while a distro comes along that offers a look at Linux in a new and fun way. One such distribution is Dreamlinux, a Morphix-based implementation of Linux that can be run from a single CD or installed on a hard drive. Dreamlinux 2.2 aims to offer a full range of desktop applications while providing a wealth of multimedia tools for easy production of professional-grade media.

Oracle has licensed patents of the Open Invention Network, a group seeking to give open source allies some clout in an intellectual property realm that favours the incumbent proprietary software powers.

Last time, I gave a users' perspective overview of the OpenID decentralized single sign-on system, and described how to take the first step: getting your own OpenID identity. Once you are comfortable with OpenID as a login method for the sites that you visit, you can look at implementing it for the sites that you run. Plugins for WordPress make the process easy to understand.

Novell is developing an open source version of Microsoft's InfoCard identity technology that will run on both Linux and Mac.

The OpenOffice.org project team said today that three security vulnerabilities, which had been reported in the last week, have been fully addressed in OpenOffice.org 2.2. The latest release candidate (RC4) of v2.2 -- including all the security fixes -- is now available for download.

The humble personal computer has a well-deserved reputation as a giant-killer. After all, it was the virus-like spread of PCs which spelled the beginning of the end for the mainframe dinosaurs. Because the first low-cost servers emerged from high-end PCs being asked to look after more than one user at once, it took quite a few of the diminutive workhorses to match the capacity of the mini-computers they were slowly but surely replacing.

At the time of writing, half an week into the second week of the vote, we have the the following statistics gathered at the beginning of the week..

OGRE Team, the developers behind the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE), have announced the latest release of OGRE, codenamed 'Eihort,' including improved advanced lighting and shadowing techniques and more. According to the engine's official website, OGRE is “a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.”

Deleting files can take forever. Windows Vista suffers from a bug that causes many machines to stall while deleting, copying and moving files, a flaw that has provoked consternation in online forums.

A new phase of wrangling over the future of the dominant open-source license, the General Public License, is set to begin Wednesday and to end 90 days afterward.

There are four objects that provide information about the environment of the user's system. They belong to the window object: navigator, screen, history and location. These objects are used to obtain information such as screen size and resolution, color depth of the monitor, limited information on the browser history, and the URL. In addition, information such as the user's operating system, including the browser type, version and language can also be obtained. In this installment, we'll look at objects, their related properties and methods. We'll delve deeper into them when we use them later in our study.

Access has licensed Bluestreak Technology's Flash player for mobile phones and set-top boxes, suggesting its Linux-based software stack for mobile phones could be used in phones that receive digital TV. The MachBlue player is said to implement a "large subset" of Adobe Flash 7 functionality.

SIL International, a nonprofit organization whose concerns include literacy and the study and preservation of minority languages, has announced the release of version 1.1 of the SIL Open Font License (OFL). The revision, which follows months of discussion and review on several mailing lists, including OFL-Discuss, clarifies the language of the license, especially about embedding fonts and allowing reserved font names.

Sys Admin Technical Conference on Security and Scripting in Baltimore May 7-8.

When Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 launched, it contained more than just new software. It also offered customers a substantially streamlined service-level agreement (SLA).

Mozilla developers are keeping up the pace on the development of their next-generation Firefox 3.0 browser with the Alpha 3 release, adding more under-the-hood improvements to security and its offline capabilities. Development began on Firefox 3.0, code-named Gran Paradiso, around October when Firefox 2.0 was released. Gran Paradiso hit its Alpha 2 release in early February.

Security researchers should make an effort to practice "responsible disclosure," according to Mozilla's security chief, Window Snyder. Her comments were made at a panel discussion during the ShmooCon hacker conference in Washington last week. "The researcher has all the power. They control when they disclose it, and they control the idea whether or not the vendor responds in time," she said during the panel, according to News.com.

Socat, netcat's "twin brother," is a utility that "establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them." It handles sockets in various ways, allowing a wide range of actions, including file transfers, port forwarding, and serial line emulation.

Practically all Unix and Linux servers run an SSH service to let administrators connect securely from remote locations. Unfortunately for security administrators, attacks on SSH services are popular today. In this article I'll show you how can you protect machines running SSH services from brute force attacks using the pam_abl plugin for SSH pluggable authentication modules (PAM).

Earlier this month, Slashdot posted a piece asking whether the Gentoo project is in "crisis." The project has responded to the issues discussed in the posting, in part, by adopting a Code of Conduct (CoC), with "proctors" who will address breaches of the CoC. So far, that move seems of limited worth.