Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you are in Germany, the country of Sauerkraut and Beethoven, and you move far to the east, you might arrive at the town of Dresden. In this city, the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) is located, which’s operating systems group has developed a C++ implementation of Jochen Liedtkes well-known L4 µ-kernel interface. This microkernel, ironically called Fiasco, is the center of all the different projects of the TU Dresden Operating System (TUD:OS) research group.

Back in March, when Linus Torvalds put his seal of approval on the Linux 2.6.16 kernel, one of the key new features that was added to the kernel was support for the PowerPC "Cell" processor co-designed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. Now, that support for the Cell chip has been brought into the Fedora Core 5 development Linux from Red Hat.

Thanks to a handful of college professors, Dutch high school students interested in open source software development now have a community specifically designed to foster participation, learning, and useful code.

To most people —especially those to whom computing is a means to accomplish some other task rather than an end in itself —systems software is boring. To paraphrase the old Clintonian phrase, "it’s the apps, stupid". What matters to most computer users is more about what IT does than how it gets done.

Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Debian will be present at the Wizards of OS conference next weekend in Berlin, Germany. André Luiz Rodrigues Ferreira wondered if there will be special Debian themes available for the desktop environments in etch. Adrian von Bidder discovered a 16 core MIPS server with Debian pre-installed.

Inspired by Cisco and Microsoft, Symantec and Juniper Networks have struck back against rivals Microsoft and Cisco with an astonishingly vague, sweeping partnership of their own.

So you just bought and assembled a brand-new AMD64 workstation. The only decision that remains is whether to install a 64-bit Linux distribution, or stick with comfortable, tried-and-true IA-32. If you are seeking an easy answer to that question, I can't help you. Running 64-bit Linux has its pros and cons. Unfortunately, a lot of the cons are out of your hands -- but they're not really Linux's fault, either.

Collax, a leading provider of Linux servers for small and medium sized businesses, announced today that former IBM, Novell and SUSE executive Richard Seibt has joined its Board of Directors.

Did you miss out on the LinuxWorld 2006 conference and expo held last month in San Francisco? Well, we have some good news for you: the show management has posted the keynote talks online for free public viewing.

Science is an open process. Experimental information and results must be published so results are verifiable and reproducible. These results are then shared with the larger community to benefit all humanity. It makes sense that the software used for scientific computations should also be open. Here are a few scientific programs of general utility.

20th Anniversary of North America's Largest and Most Comprehensive IT Event Continues to Drive Revolution in Business Technology

Every wise old system and network administrator knows that security is a multilayer process. You have your firewalls and other border security, perhaps some internal network segmentation, and application and operating system security. However, locking down the operating system is probably the most crucial link in this chain.

Authentication is the process in which a program determines whether a user is actually the person who he claims to be. It is used in any kind of a system that provides different services to people depending upon their membership. When you log in to your favorite mailbox, access ATM, or use the services of Net Banking; what you are actually doing is obtaining service from the service provider after proving your credibility using your credentials (i.e. generally your user name and password).

A recent Slashdot item on Wi-Fi security was a timely reminder of the weaknesses of default Wi-Fi encryption protocols, and the dangers of using unencrypted, public Wi-Fi connections. Fortunately, you can use FOSS utilities to securely tunnel your Wi-Fi connection sessions and protect your Web and email traffic.

March is the last date set for the Free Software Foundation's release of the third revision of its General Public License. The open source camp has already made its opposition to the licence fairly clear; the FSF, while admitting that the draft for GPL Version 3 is not yet finalised, is unlikely to compromise on key changes from the existing licence, the very changes that are the major sticking points between the two camps.

The France-based Zenwalk GNU/Linux development team introduced v3.0, its latest stable major release, on Sept. 8. Zenwalk 3.0, which features a 2.6.17 Linux kernel and the Xfce desktop, is now available for download, as is ZenLive-2.8.1, a bug-fix update to Zenwalk's live CD edition.

A start-up called Simply RISC has built a single-core variant of Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc T1, an indication of interest in Sun's plan to encourage others to adopt and modify open-source designs for the processor.

Linux Networx completed a new round of venture financing Monday, giving the company an additional $37 million to bring its Linux-based, cluster supercomputers to industry and research marketplaces.

Ever since Sun announced the inclusion of Java DB, known in the wild as Derby, in the JDK of the Java SE platform, there have been many complaints about it. A recent blog entry (funny URL by the way :) by Simon Morris caught my attention. I understand why one would complain about bloating the JDK with a database, or with the WS stack or even Rhino for that matter.

The Google Summer of Code is over, and final reports have been submitted. Most of our students worked well right up to (and in some cases beyond) the end of the summer, and hopefully we'll see some useful results from their projects coming to light soon. Expect a more detailed summary of what was achieved, coming soon to a d-d-a list near you.