Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

There's a very interesting paper published by Goldman Sachs and posted by Hewlett Packard, Fear the Penguin [PDF]. You will recall that both companies sent representatives to join Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian on the stage and to speak about how wonderful it all was on the day Microsoft and Novell announced their deal. According to the paper, Linux is going to take over the corporate data center.

[The report is a few months old, it will be interesting to see how accurate its predictions turn out to be. - Scott]

For many years, the term "open source" has been subject to abuse. Despite efforts by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) to trademark the phrase, the USPTO (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) claimed the phrase was too generic to be trademarked, thereby weakening efforts to guard against its improper usage, according to Danese Cooper, secretary and treasurer of the OSI board.

TimeSys has published a second podcast on achieving rapid boots on Linux devices. "Fast boots -- the sequel" discusses the relationship of footprint and boot time, post-2.6.15 kernels' CONFIG_EMBEDDED option, application pre-linking and profiling, filesystem selection, execute-in-place (XIP), and initramfs, among other interesting techniques.

The trade press reported a lot of rumors this past week about the chances for a patent protection pact between Red Hat and Microsoft similar to the agreements Microsoft negotiated with Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. Red Hat doesn't appear to be interested in the least. Here's why.

A start-up located in the French Alps near Grenoble is readying a tiny ARM-based Linux single-board computer (SBC) in a USB key form-factor. Calao, based in Sant Martin le Vinoux, is also readying a tiny Linux SBC designed to plug into QIL (quad in-line) IC sockets.

Quick -- name an open source product that's innovative. If you said "Linux," you failed the test. Linux -- the darling of counter-culture programmers, for its "free software" advocacy and for providing an alternative to Microsoft Windows -- is not an innovation. It's essentially a copy of another operating system, called Unix, that has been around since the 1970s. Making a copy of existing product? No one that I know would call that "innovation."

[Contradictions abound in this article. - Scott]

Mandriva this week announced the general availability of Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0, the latest version of its enterprise-dedicated, KDE-based Linux work station. The new desktop features a 2.6.17 kernel and can be installed in under 15 minutes and extensively customized, thanks to a new post-installation tool, the company said.

This article is a step-by-step guide to using two passwords with EncFS. The primary password is required and may be used to secure all data; the secondary password is optional and may be stored on USB stick or other removable media and used to secure more sensitive data. EncFS can also be combined with block [...]

What does Xandros get out of its recent deal with Microsoft? Well, for one thing, the well-known Linux desktop distributor will get Open XML/ODF translators for OpenOffice. These translators are being developed through the SourceForge-hosted Open XML/ODF Translator project. This is the same translation project that Novell and Microsoft have been working on for some time now.

Since piloting this video series, we’ve received lots of questions about the XO’s mesh network. How can these laptops “talk” to each other even without widespread internet access? How is the network they create different from the network at your home or office? Episode 03 explains it all.

The Avon and Somerset Constabulary in Great Britain uses animations created with the open source tool Blender to help citizens understand how to protect their vehicles and possessions from theft.

Vim users stick with Vim in no small part because muscle memory is so powerful -- once you've learned Vim's keybindings, it's possible to be extremely productive in Vim without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. If you'd like to imbue Firefox with Vim power, embrace the Vimperator extension. Vimperator turns Firefox into a no-nonsense, modal Web browser.

WordPress yesterday released WordPress 2.2.1, which incorporates a number of small bug fixes and tweaks, along with some security issues that make this a required upgrade.

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.