Showing headlines posted by dave

In a recent journal entry at Advogato, Michael Love, the founder and lead developer of GNU-Darwin has posted a reminder of GNU-Darwin's disapproval of U.S. policy. His non-mainstraim views are an example of the politcal extremism we've become desensitized to over the years. Here is the question: is it a good idea to use a position as the head of popular free software projects to publish political propaganda?

Actuate's new research and development center in China will play a pivotal role in its Linux strategy, according to a senior company executive. San Francisco-based Actuate sells business intelligence software, designed to help companies analyze their operations by generating reports from data sources such as spreadsheets and databases.

The LUG of Iraq is establishing a Linux Center in Baghdad to conduct training in all levels of Linux usage, administration, and development. With a mission to launch a Linux-based training lab and a lending library, the organization seeking global assistance in setting up the program.

Minimo is a new Gecko-based browser built for PDAs and other mobile devices. Check in for the interview and for screenshots of the mobile versions of OSNews and NMC rendering under Minimo. [Thanks to LinuxDevices.com for the link.]

Open source projects have a fanatical band of devotees and growing momentum in the enterprise. But there remains a pain point: monetizing the business. How can companies contribute to open source and see a financial return on the resources they invest? Next week's Open Source Business Conference 2004, held in San Francisco, hopes to provide some answers.

Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman, office of the CEO, will deliver the opening keynote of the inaugural Open Source Business Conference (OSBC 2004), taking place March 16-17 in San Francisco.

Australian open source developers and advocates are wary of the trade deal struck with the US, saying it would lead to the acceptance of American-style patent and intellectual property laws which, in turn, would cripple the local software industry.

Alerted by a posting on Bugtraq [1] the UUDeview [2] package was reviewed. It was found that 0.5.19 and later contains a bug which leads to failure retrieving the filename during decode. All versions suffered from insecure temporary file handling. Version 0.5.20 contains bug fixes for the parsing of header lines, exact handling of maximum line length and fixes for two buffer overflows which needed backporting. The corected packages listed above remedy all of these problems.

I have completely skipped Mandrake Linux 9.2 because previous versions of Mandrake Linux were not exactly that "glamorous". However, I wanted to try out the new Linux kernel 2.6.x on my new Linare PC and so I decided to give Mandrake 10.0 Community Edition a spin. Here are some quick thoughts on it on how MandrakeSoft has earned back my trust with this release.

Steve Kemp from the GNU/Linux audit project discovered a problem in xitalk, a talk intercept utility for the X Window System. A local user can exploit this problem and execute arbitrary commands under the GID utmp. This could be used by an attacker to remove traces from the utmp file.

A nice roundup of recent happening in the Linux universe.

Demands Website to Be Blocked for Certain International Users

The Computer Emergency Response Team of the University of Stuttgart (RUS-CERT) criticizes Mozilla's security approach to security leaks. They find fault in the fact that no official security advisories are published by the Mozilla Foundation. Instead security leaks are silently patched and incorporated into newer releases.

This article explains how you can use .pot files to translate Mozilla products or extensions. Let's retire Mozilla Translator; using .pot files from the GNU/Gettext library is much easier, IMHO.

It would be better for Sun to look at the parts of Java that do not lead to server-sales or profit, and to farm them off into smaller, separate, focussed, Open Source efforts whose can concentrate on maintaining them. The name of this game is No Resource Contention: the community interested in one library should be able to concentrate on it.

If you've been using MySQL database to store your important data, it is imperative that you make a backup of your data to prevent any loss of data. This article shows you how to backup and restore data in your MySQL database. This process can also be used if you have to move your data to a new server.

/k/ Embedded Java Solutions (prounounced "kah") and Quest Innovations B.V. will partner to develop a MIPS-based 32-bit CPU core that will run Linux software in parallel with a hardware execution engine for Java byte codes. The device will target low-cost Java-enabled embedded devices.

Brazil's government says it will train a thousand state workers to use freely available software as part of an effort to save more than 18 million pounds in information technology costs.

Linux is powering the infrastructure behind a distributed global network hosting images of the current Mars Rover and the European Space Agency's recent Rosetta comet chaser mission.

...Furthermore, government departments are banned from using products that do not support open standards and specifications, they will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary products and services, and will consider obtaining full rights to any bespoke code that they commission.