Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" being less than one month away, the feature freeze having long passed, and the kernel freeze being imminent, it's time for the usual biannual Ubuntu Linux benchmarking festivities at Phoronix. In the coming days and weeks there will be numerous articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when it comes to its desktop/workstation performance, boot performance, power consumption, and all sorts of other figures to judge the performance of Ubuntu's Precise Pangolin release. One area from the testing thus far that has stood out has been the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS performance on older PC hardware, but unfortunately it's not standing out for a good reason.

"If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it is the light of the oncoming train" ~ Robert Lowell. Oh yes, another good quote. This post is on SSH tunneling, or as I like to call it 'Poor Man's VPN'. Contrary to the sysadmin's popular belief, SSH tunneling actually can be very valuable use for both techies and home users. I say contrary to popular belief because 'reverse tunneling' and tunneling http traffic through SSH can bypass firewalls and content filters. But this article isn't about how to violate your corporate internet use policy, it's about how to create SSH tunnels to make your life just a little bit easier.

When Maggie Vail first heard about open-source software, she said, “it felt like punk rock.” Ms. Vail, a longtime member of the independent rock music scene, is one of the executive directors of CASH Music, a nonprofit group that wants to bring some of punk’s do-it-yourself spirit to an area that many musicians find frustratingly complex and expensive: managing their music and fan interactions online.

Developers are sucking buggy open-source programming frameworks off the web unaware that newer fixed versions exist, according to a new report. Packages of the Google Web Toolkit, the Spring Model View Controller, and Apache's Struts and Xerces have been downloaded millions of times despite the fact they contain known vulnerabilities - as evidenced by a trawl through the Sonatype.org central repository.

GNOME 3.4, the latest major update to the GNOME3 desktop, is set to be officially released on Wednesday. Here's a look at some of the most interesting features of this biannual GNOME update.

Iceland has kicked off a migration project to put its public institutions on a strict diet of free and open source software. The move will affect a wide variety of institutions, and it could result in savings for the country's cash-strapped government. However, just because software is free as in beer and free as in freedom doesn't mean maintenance will come at no cost.

A new version, simply labelled "2012_3_24", of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick Verner, the update fixes a number of issues related to interaction between the BusyBox tool collection and Clonezilla, and upgrades a number of the included applications.

More than 50 percent of the world’s largest corporations have open source applications with security vulnerabilities. That’s because more than 80 percent of software applications built in-house by enterprise developers incorporate open source components and frameworks that may be vulnerable.

LXer Feature: 26-Mar-2012

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup for your reading pleasure.

The report of KDE e.V. for the fourth quarter of 2011 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported in the last 3 months of last year. The report has a message from the President of the Board reflecting on the first 15 years of KDE and looking forward to more opportunities. There are stories about exciting product announcements and the various sprints that produced exceptional results. Read the full report (PDF). read more

Last year, Linux celebrated its 20th anniversary. The kernel that Linus Torvalds started as a hobby project helped the Internet bloom, challenged proprietary operating system dominance, and powers hundreds of millions of devices. From hacker toys like the dirt-cheap Raspberry Pi to most of the Top 500 Supercomputers, Linux dominates the computing industry. But it wouldn't have been possible without GCC, which turns 25 today. Before Torvalds started hacking away on Linux, Richard Stallman and started the GNU (GNU's Not UNIX) project and part of that was the GNU C Compiler (GCC). Eventually that became the GNU Compiler Collection (also GCC) but we're getting a little ahead of the story.

The open source web site of the European Commission is reporting that Iceland's government has started a project to prepare for the migration of all its workstations to open source software. This project is scheduled to be completed within a year and according to its leader, Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the city of Reykjavik, the National Hospital and all of the country's ministries are setting good examples for such migrations.

Fragmentation in the Android universe is causing some developers to flee, according to a recent study from Appcelerator and IDC. "It's not just that Ice Cream Sandwich is new; it's also the fact that very few of the tablets currently available actually support [it]," said Appcelerator's Mike King. Further, there are many devices that cannot run ICS, he added.

Canonical’s next long-term support release of its flagship Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04 is in late beta. This next release, due out on April 26th, is in beta now. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and so far, so good. Indeed, the new Ubuntu is good enough already that I’ve it on my default Ubuntu system: a 2009-era Gateway DX4710. This PC is powered by a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and has 6GBs of RAM and an Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100 for graphics. No, it’s not fast, but unlike Windows 8’s beta, you don’t need a fast computer for Ubuntu.

One can never say it enough: the terminal is a very powerful tool, and is probably the most interesting part in Unix. Among the plethora of useful commands and scripts that you can use, some seem less practical, if not completely useless. I’ve selected for you a couple of commands that are useless because they are funny, but not funny because they are useless (or maybe the other way around for some). If you are searching for ASCII art, random math curiosities, or various (in)utilities, this is the best of the useless.

Soon, the kernel will support several AMD graphics cores that are used in recent Radeon graphics cards and in various upcoming processors. In systems with Intel graphics, using hibernation can cause memory corruption. The development of Linux 3.4 has started.

Richard Guenther of SUSE on behalf of the GNU Compiler Collection development community has announced the official release of GCC 4.7.0.

Google has introduced certificate-based authentication for developers requiring secure connections to the advertising broker's cloud. Google Service Accounts - announced today in a post in a blog post - will validate web apps' access to the company's servers with a certificate rather than passwords or shared keys.

Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman will be moderating the highly-anticipated Linux kernel panel at the Collaboration Summit in a couple short weeks. He was generous enough to take a few moments recently to answer some questions about what we might hear from the Linux kernel panel, as well as some details on his recent work and projects. Oh, and we couldn't resist asking him about the new Raspberry Pi.

The Open Source Initiative has announced three new board members: Mike Millinkovich, Luis Villa and Deb Bryant. From 1 April, they will be taking over seats on the open source advocating organisation's board which were freed by the departure of Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. As announced at FOSDEM 2012, for the first time, the OSI board invited nominations for two of the seats from non-directors, specifically the new OSI affiliates; they retained one seat for a board-only appointment.