Showing headlines posted by tuxchick

In some ways, all the uproar about Apple saving location data on its iOS device users is old news. Guess what? Big Brother, or Big Google, also collects geo-location information from its mobile, Android-powered devices. It’s like anything else in computing: geo-location can provide great services and resources, but it can also be abused.

This week’s blog post relates to an area we often dismiss with open source software, money. In fact, the most common thought on money and open source is “hey, it’s free and works.” The reality is of course more complicated and I argue that open source is very expensive for the organizations running a project and sometimes they might not even consider all the costs when considering a new open source project. For this discussion, I am not referring to open source projects run by individuals, but large-scale solutions run by public companies or foundations.

So, let me stress this one more time: if you have two GUI applications, e.g. an OpenOffice Word Processor, and a stupid Tetris game, both of which granted access to your screen (your X server), then there is no isolation between those two apps. Even if they run as different user accounts! Even if they are somehow sandboxed by SELinux or whatever! None, zero, null, nil!

Even I finally got my bellyful of SCO. But there is yet one guy left who still can't get enough. And so it transpires that there are new developments in the never-ending trademark dispute that was initiated by X/Open in 2001 when Wayne Gray tried to trademark the mark INUX. If you recall, the dispute was put on ice back in the summer of 2010, pending resolution of Gray's civil litigation.

The Third Humble Indie Bundle that focuses upon games offered by Frozenbyte that are multi-platform and free of any Digital Rights Management, is still for sale at any price you wish (literally). This morning though there's been a surprise announcement by Frozenbyte with some bonuses, including the source-code release of the Frozenbyte and Frozenbyte: Shadowgrounds games!..

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Calligra sees further work on Modern Menu, pdf export, soft page breaks, Autoshapes support, and vertical alignment support amongst continued bugfixing and optimization KMLDonkey fully ported to KDE4 / Qt4, removing all Qt3 support Sound support added for 5 new languages in KLettres read more

Today, there are open source Linux drivers for all major Wi-Fi chips, which was unimaginable five years ago. The constant pressure for open source drivers has thus paid off, and this may also work in other areas in the long term.

If you've ever missed an important IRC discussion because you happened to be between home and the office at just the wrong time, or if you regularly log on from a number of different locations and don't like juggling multiple IRC nicks, then you need an IRC proxy. The leading open source IRC proxy is Bip, a GPLv2 utility that is provided as a standard offering by most Linux distributions. This weekend, let's set up Bip and stop missing important discussions!

The KDM code for KDE SC 4.7 has just gained one small but noteworthy feature: GRUB2 support. While the KDE Display Manager gaining support for the GRUB2 boot-loader may seem nonchalant, it's actually quite useful. Now from the KDE Display Manager, users are able to select another GRUB boot entry without affecting the default choice or having to wait for the boot-loader to appear when rebooting...

Here’s a legitimate question, and one you should consider: If your CPU is 20 times faster than hardware from a decade ago, why does it take the same amount of time — sometimes longer — to go from a cold start to online and reading e-mail?

A jury has found that in using Linux on its back-end servers, Google has infringed a patent held by a small Texas-based company and must pay $5m in damages.

In 2006, Bedrock Computer Technologies sued Google and several other outfits – including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL – claiming they infringed on a patent filed in January 1997. The patent describes "a method and apparatus for performing storage and retrieval...that uses the hashing technique with the external chaining method for collision resolution", and the accusation is that companies infringed by using various versions of the Linux kernel on their servers.

In the first IPv6 for Linux crash course, we covered some of the bare basics of IPv6 on Linux. Today we're going to learn how to use routable IPv6 addresses, some iptables rules to keep our experimentation from leaking out into the world, and about implementing DNS in IPv6.

The Rawstudio raw photo editor made its 2.0 release on April 8, boasting a hefty list of improvements. There are new features, such as tethered shooting and automatic distortion correction, almost every tool in the toolbox has seen an improvement — including some you might not think needed improving. If you shoot with a raw-capable digital camera, it's time to update.

The Fedora Project announced the beta release of its Fedora 15 "Lovelock" Linux distribution, featuring the new GNOME 3 desktop, the Systemd initialization system, and a new dynamic firewall feature. Meanwhile, though, GNOME 3 has received mixed reviews from the GNOME faithful, many claiming the project went too far in simplifying the interface....

Gives GNOME a big hug The Fedora Project has released the first and only beta for their next Linux distro, fully embracing the GNOME desktop that rival Ubuntu will shuffle away from later this month.…

In my case, I wanted to update because I was having a small glitch with my intel graphics related to refreshing of the screen on my Samsung N150P plus netbook. Sometimes I had to switch to a different virtual desktop and come back in order to force the refresh of the whole screen to see things right... and I was tired of it.

The Ubuntu Technical Board has voted not to install the non-free extras package by default during a standard Ubuntu Install. This an option that, if selected, installs proprietary software including hardware drivers, media codecs and the Flash player. It has been opt-in rather than opt out since its first appearance.

Capturing screen images of applications is something that all technical writers, most graphical application developers, many technical marketing staff members, and even many users need to do. Modern UNIX® systems provide a number of different tools to capture graphical screens and single windows. This article, the second of three, focuses on tools that are present on every Linux® and UNIX system that uses the X Window System. These tools make it easy to capture graphical portions of the screen to help illustrate both proper and improper program behavior.

D-Link announced a Linux-based surveillance camera for homes and small offices that offers VGA-quality video streaming at 20fps plus infrared video for night vision. The $150 Wireless N Day/Night Network Camera (DCS-932L) offers Ethernet and 802.11n connections, and enables video streaming to LAN or web-connected PCs as well as Android and Apple iOS mobile devices, says the company....

Stefano Fratepietro has announced the release of DEFT Linux 6.1, a customised distribution of the Ubuntu live CD containing some of the best open-source applications dedicated to incident response and computer forensics: "DEFT Linux 6.1 is ready for download. DEFT Linux 6.1 is the last planned release of the DEFT 6 series. From June 2011 we will start working on version 7. It will feature great improvements of both the architectural structure and the included applications. Release notes: start faster by 15% over the previous version; optimization of initrd; RegTime.py and Recovery.py. Fixed problem of large pcap file uploads in Xplico. Revision of all DEFT extras tools to comply with their licenses. DEFT 6 can boot from USB drives."