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LXer Feature: 27-Aug-2009

For a number of years I have been when possible working on what is called the GNU Telephony Secure Calling initiative to make communication intercept a thing of the past, whether for individuals, private organizations, or national governments, and to do so entirely using free software.

The Free Software Foundation today launched a campaign against Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, calling it "treacherous computing" that stealthily takes away rights from users.

Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor written in Gtk2-Perl. It aims to bring the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically. Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries.

By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth. Canonical has already come close to achieving this with the Ubuntu 9.04 release earlier this year, but how is Ubuntu 9.10 changing the boot time with defaulting to the EXT4 file-system and their other ongoing changes? In this article, we have re-installed Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, and a 9.10 development snapshot on two netbooks and one laptop to see how Ubuntu's boot time is changing.

This tutorial explains how you can install the Google Chrome browser on Ubuntu 9.04 and how to enable the Adobe Flash plugin in it. Please note that Google Chrome for Ubuntu is still in alpha state and should not be used on production systems.

Motorola really needs to pull something exciting out of the mobile phone development bag if it is to regain any kind of meaningful position as a leader in the mobile phone innovation league table. So why is it being so d@mn secretive about the Android handset launch?

Nokia N900 runs on the new Maemo 5 Linux open source software. The N900 lets users open multiple application windows and run simultaneously while taking advantage of its cellular features. The N900 offers a high-res WVGA touch screen, QWERTY keyboard and a Mozilla powered browser. The device runs on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, with up to 1GB of application memory and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration.

Linux user for a couple of years. Only Linux and I love it. Still, some things are wrong, they are wrong, and unfortunately, as I see it, they will always be wrong (yes I'm paid by Microsoft to say this; and yes I get the big bucks from them; and yes that's true, and unfortunately it seems like it's true for a long time now :(

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNOME Foundation are targeting higher women's participation in the community. The first step is a "mini-summit" on "Women in Free Software."

Another ho hum day turns sour. Just when you thought it was safe to return to those keyboards knowing that all is well with the world and the ownership of Unix is happy with its rightful owner, Novell; he's baaaack. I'm sure that I'm not the first to look at this latest news and say "WHAA? AGAIN? I thought we had this settled." But noooo, Linux arch nemesis SCO with the inimitable Darl McBride at the helm is at it again.

In this article by Alfonso Romero, we will learn how to configure NetBeans, VirtualBox and the Turnkey LAMP Appliance to develop complex PHP applications in a virtual environment. This article explains the process of creating a virtual machine, configuring the NetBeans PHP IDE, and managing a WordPress project with NetBeans in a step wise manner.

Recently I came across this article on h-online.com discussing some of the new features and functionality that is to be expected in the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. As I am usually more interested in data storage technologies, it was the file system and other storage concepts that drew my attention. I will only cover a few of the listed topics. You can read a full list of these patches provided in the h-online link I posted above. Some updates include a large patch for the btrfs file system which have tuned the file system to achieve greater performance. It is also noted that in this release btrfs will be less memory hungry and the SSD mode has been improved. Early benchmarks comparing both standard and SSD modes have shown the early implementation of SSD mode to be less than ideal. I am interested to see this improvement, especially as Flash-based SSDs increase in usage and popularity.

In addition to the usual selection of new features, Ubuntu 9.10 will also provide solutions for 100 common "papercuts," or minor bugs that cause usability issues. These are 5 of the most common and most annoying papercuts that will be addressed.

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists. It is kind of a Gnome Amarok (If I may call it that...). Exaile 0.3.0 is a complete rewrite of Exaile from the ground up, and should make development of future versions much easier.

Ever tire of laying out a sheet of address labels in OpenOffice.org or Word templates when you’re in a hurry? Karl Fogel’s LabelNation may be able to help. It is a small free software tool that whips out printer-ready label layouts from the command line.

Tuxera has announced an "extensive co-operation" with Microsoft. Tuxera, the company formed by the NTFS-3G developers, has signed an Intellectual Property Agreement with Microsoft and joined its exFAT Programme. Tuxera says that this will allow it, as the first independent software vendor in the programme, to offer exFAT drivers.

Tristan Louis gives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means "false" or "fake". So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there's more fauxpen stuff than ever.

Perl development has been transformed by exciting new technologies such as Catalyst, DBIx::Class, and Moose. However, installing Perl modules can still be difficult in some environments. Fortunately, there is a simple solution - local::lib.

A group of OpenBSD developers have joined in the AerieBSD project. A new distro is being prepared whose likeness to OpenBSD is unmistakable.

Google has released version 2.0.172.43 of Chrome 2, a security update fixing three vulnerabilities. A high-severity vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript engine could allow an attacker to run specially-crafted JavaScript on a page, bypassing security checks to read unauthorised memory, or even leading to the execution of arbitrary code. The vulnerability is reportedly contained to the Chrome sandbox. According to Google, for an attack to be successful, a "victim would need to visit a page under an attacker's control". Further details of the vulnerability, however, are currently being withheld until "a majority of users are up to date with the fix".