Showing all newswire headlines

Imhad Sousou, director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, has said that Intel want to see a future version of Moblin boot within two seconds. This aim was one of the items he discussed at the Linux Collaboration Summit, in San Francisco. The recent Moblin 2 alpha has already shown a reasonably rapid boot process with most of the major components starting up within seconds, but Sousou says that Intel wants to build on this to bring the total start up time to two seconds, while retaining the full software stack.

Sharing lies at the heart of free software, and drives much of its incredible efficiency as a development methodology. It means that coders do not have to re-invent the wheel, but can borrow from pre-existing programs. Software patents, despite their name, are about locking down knowledge so that it cannot be shared without permission (and usually payment). But are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source licence? That's the question posed by a new licence that is being submitted to the Open Source Inititative (OSI) for review.

Linux Mint 6 "KDE" edition is released. This edition is based on Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. This KDE edition comes with a brand new "Software Manager", FTP support in mintUpload, proxy support and history of updates in mintUpdate, mint4win (a Linux Mint installer for Microsoft Windows), and a lot of other improvements.

The open source Asterisk VoIP PBX is now at its 1.6.x release -- it's a number that Asterisk is going to stay at for a long time. "Basically everything is now a candidate for a 1.6.x release," Fleming said. "We're much like the Linux kernel in that way, we see no reason why we will need an Asterisk 1.8."

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that Linux adoption is advancing two to three times faster than that of other platforms and that it will be boosted as companies consolidate their technical infrastructure during this economic downturn. Similar views were expressed by an IDC analyst who has recently authored a report which suggests that Linux will withstand the recession better than its competitors.

Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems have software built-in necessary for tracking and reporting usage statistics. Thankfully GNU/Linux doesn’t include such software. But, we also can’t see what kind of market share GNU/Linux holds. So, I want to share with everyone, a way to tell when GNU/Linux has entered the mainstream. It’s called “The Simpsons Test.” We’ve all probably seen the episode of The Simpsons “The Burns and the Bees” Here’s how it works...

Last week Nexuiz 2.5 was released and we said it raised the bar for open-source gaming as it already offered impressive graphics and this new release was greeted by various engine improvements, new models, and over 3,000 other changes. Well, Nexuiz is not the only open-source first person shooter striving for perfection even without the backing of a major game studio. A relatively unheard of game engine is XreaL, which has not had a stable release yet but its lead developer claims that it is definitely the most advanced open-source game engine.

Plugins are not mysterious elite geek things, but rather are scripts for automating tasks that you perform frequently. They can be very simple, for example flipping an image upside-down, or as complex as you like. Akkana Peck shows us how to create a simple GIMP plugin using Python.

Once we demonstrated a GNU/Linux live cd for him and showed him how he could run his "necessary" programs via Wine and VirtualBox, he was sold...and I mean on the spot. We used two 8 gig thumb drives to copy his music, pictures and documents then did a partition session and replaced his Windows Vista sytem with Mint Linux. After 29 minutes, I announced that his install was done and that we would now boot into his new Linux Operating System. His jaw dropped.

In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure MyDNS-NG and MyDNSConfig 3 on Debian Lenny. MyDNS-NG is a DNS server that uses a MySQL database as backend instead of configuration files like, for example, Bind or djbdns. MyDNSConfig is an easy to use web-based interface to MyDNS-NG. MyDNSConfig can create all types of DNS records that are available in MyDNS and adds features like user management and access privileges.

A vulnerability in the CIFS client in the Linux Kernel code makes it possible for a manipulated SMB server to cause users systems to crash or be compromised. The problem is caused by a buffer in the CIFSTCon function in fs/cifs/connect.c file being too small. This function is used when the server responds to a connection request for a resource, known as a Tree Connect. Overflowing the undersized buffer could allow code to be injected and executed. The bug only comes into play if the users system attempts to mount a resource on a manipulated server.

I love old technology as much as the next techno-geezer, but come on, it wasn't all wonder and goodness. After we're done reminiscing about the good old days of operating systems, let's reflect on the bad old days of operating systems as well. After all, the bad times are still with us -- even in 2009, there are still some wretched operating systems out there. In historical order, from oldest to newest, here's my own personal list of the top (bottom?) 10 OS stinkers.

Any old standards hand forced to choose the single most disputed issue in standard setting over the past decade would likely respond with a deceivingly simple question: "What does it mean to be an 'open standard?'" A similar debate rages in the open source community between those that believe that some licenses (e.g., the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses) are "open enough," while others would respond with an emphatic Hell No! (or less printable words to similar effect).

Packet filtering and firewalling has a long history in Linux. The first filtering mechanism, called "ipfwadm," was released in 1995 for the 1.2.1 kernel. This code was used until the 2.2.0 stable release (January, 1999), when the new "ipchains" module took over. While ipchains was useful, it only lasted until 2.4.0 (January, 2001), when it, too, was replaced by iptables/netfilter, which remains in the kernel now. If netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy has his way, though, iptables, too, will be gone in the future, replaced by yet another mechanism called "nftables." This article will give an overview of how nftables works, followed by a discussion of the motivations behind this change.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell today announced that the openSUSE Project, which drives the development variant of its Linux, will support the creation and packaging of various Linuxes for ARM processors using the openSUSE Build Service version 1.6. According to Novell, the support for building application stacks and Linux distros for 32-bit ARM RISC processors was donated to the openSUSE community by German software company DataSoft GmbH. DataSoft has created a set of applications, called 5e, for network operators and content providers that is stacked atop the openSUSE distro.

The whole Libspotify API (initially with support just for Linux on IA-32) comes with conditions attached which make it anything but open and hardly likely to propel it out of the iTunes shadow.

You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users. Unlike UNetbootin, which installs Linux on a hard disk partition, Wubi works by installing Ubuntu within a file stored on your Windows drive, and adding itself to the Windows boot.ini file to allow you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time.

Several months ago, I wrote how to make activity designers happy by making it easier to create simple learning activities using popular software development tools, particularly for the Sugar learning environment. Back then, I concluded that Adobe's Flash player and Flex libraries were the proper tools for this purpose. I was wrong. Adobe's flash and flex are great tools but they will never form the basis of a thriving ecosystem of open-source educational software. This is because Adobe's flash files are distributed in binary format, an immediate disincentive to sharing the source code.

Sun has added support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to the latest version of its "open source" desktop virtualization software. Other enhancements to VirtualBox 2.2 (left) include greater hypervisor optimization and 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications, says an eWEEK story.

For the first time it's possible to choose which kernel you want to use for the popular Linux distro Debian, either the Linux kernel, or the FreeBSD kernel.