Showing headlines posted by danwarne

Samba developer and open source legend Andrew Tridgell says the open source community is poor at fighting patent attacks, but says things could improve with some changes in strategy. He offered his tips for effectively fighting patent holders making claims against open source projects at the recent Linux.conf.au.

A new botnet, “psyb0t” is the first known to be capable of directly infecting home routers and cable/DSL modems.

Linux runs on the first e-book reader released this year ... and on the second ... and the third. Just a few days ago, the first Kindle 2s started shipping from Amazon.com, making them the first e-book readers to be released to the public this year -- and you may be surprised to learn that what's inside isn't some proprietary software running on Windows CE, but rather the good old Linux kernel.

Want to know what happens if you suggest a way to fix Linux that might solve a major difficulty, but also introduce new problems? To quote Linus Torvalds: " I laugh in your face!" Torvalds was at the Australian Linux conference, Linux.conf.au today.

So you thought Linux was the key to the Eee PC's success? Not so, according to ASUS. "The bulk of the requests and requirements we see in the marketplace are for the model with Windows rather than Linux," says Henry Lee, Acer's senior product manager. "It's a give and take between simplicity of usage for the masses versus full customisation. The Linux version is really only to use exactly what is provided, and someone in the know can easily remove what's been installed. But consumers are accustomed to the Windows environment, and the Windows version will be a stronger player eventually."

It sounds crazy to say this, but the XP-based version of the Eee PC 900 (the new version with the 8.9" screen) will actually be considerably -cheaper- than the Linux based version. At the official launch today, the company told journalists that "Microsoft has been a longstanding supporter of Asus" to explain the price discrepancy. And -- get this -- only the XP-based machine will be sold at mass-market retailers, while the Linux-based model will be consigned to computer stores.

More bad news for Microsoft: the world's largest PC maker, Hewlett Packard, has announced it will start shipping desktop PCs preloaded with RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 in Australia from as little as $AU600 ($US486). RHELD5 comes with OpenOffice, Firefox and Evolution included. The clear message from HP is that small businesses can now avoid the licence cost of buying Vista and Office on their PCs while retaining "big PC manufacturer" levels of support.

Prominent Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas recently quit and left it all behind. According to Kolivas, Linux is burdened with "enterprise cr@p" and the kernel developers are oblivious to the performance problems of Linux on the desktop. In this interview, he talks about what pushed him to quit and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computing.

One man's tale of how Windows screwed up a RAIDed drive configuration and the Linux community rallied round to fix it. WARNING: The following heartfelt love story is a nerdfest of extreme proportions. Enjoy.

If you don't read Filesystem Weekly, you might have been having trouble figuring out what all the hype over Sun's ZFS file system -- to be supported by Mac OS X 10.5 and now in Linux as a FUSE module -- is all about. APCmag.com's Ashton Mills has taken the jargon and translated it into plain English.

The latest in this vintage clothing named distribution (yes yes, we know the are roots in Red Hat) comes with a new distribution format, the latest X.org release for 3D accelerated goodness, and an extremely polished desktop environment. When we eventually got it installed, that is.

The hardware specs are reasonable (considering it's an XPS) but what's more interesting is whether Dell bundled Ubuntu as-is or tailored the distribution for its kit.

Pop the champagne corks, Microsoft. The first OpenOffice virus has emerged, displaying an indecent pic of a guy in a bunny suit fornicating with a girl in the woods.

Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has spoken on a number of interesting topics, including putting Firefox on mobile phones, trademark stoushes with Linux distributions, how Firefox is earning $US55million a year

It's out love for Ubuntu that I'm being so harsh in this review. Look where we're at -- 7.04, a number of significant releases since 4.10 Warty three years ago -- and it still can't manage the display resolution properly, for example.

Intel will shortly announce that its future "Mobile Internet Devices" and UMPCs will be Linux-powered, using a custom version of the Chinese Red Flag distribution.