Showing all newswire headlines

In Part I Eric Geier showed us how to turn a cheap wireless router into a hotspot gateway with CoovaAP, to safely offer wireless Internet access to visitors. Today we'll learn Coova's free services to centrally manage and control our hotspots, how to customize our portal page, and how to manage users.

The Battle for Wesnoth is a free turn-based strategy game licensed under the GPL. After over one year of constant development, a new stable version, 1.6, was released on March 22, 2009, featuring many graphics and gameplay improvements. To compile this release of Wesnoth on Debian Lenny or Ubuntu Intrepid, you only need to follow the steps below.

Command-Line-Fu is a new, bash.org-style site for collecting command-line tips and tricks. Juliet Kemp gives us a quick tour of this endlessly-useful new site.

Free-software activist Richard Stallman has warned the open-source community against falling into the trap of downloading Javascript code that's not "free". Stallman said the spread of AJAX-based web services like Google Docs means you many be running Javascript code on your machine that's not free without realizing it. He pointed to Google Docs that downloads a half-megabyte Javascript program to your machine as an example.

It's no surprise though, as Canonical renewed most artwork elements for the upcoming Jaunty Jackalope in that small interval. But new artwork is not even close to everything Ubuntu 9.04 will have to offer.

The next big release of the open source Eclipse IDE will be all about going online. "E4 is a technology incubator for both technology ideas and community that we want to see evolve the Eclipse platform," Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. "E4 is focused on a number of main areas, the first is bringing Eclipse to the Web." The move online will take some time, Milinkovich expects the first E4 beta to ship this summer with a final release not targeted until 2010.

The GPS maker, which is being sued by Microsoft, is joining the Open Invention Network, which also counts Red Hat, IBM, and Google as members.

In the seemingly never-ending browser wars, monthly usage statistics are an important metric of just what is really going on on the "battlefield." For Open Source advocates, these statistics are equally if not more important, as they give a reasonably reliable overview of Open Source adoption. That may explain some of the excitement surrounding February's browser statistics, which seem to show Firefox topping the list.

The student application period for Google Summer of Code begins at 19:00 UTC today, and closes at 19:00 UTC on April 3rd. Students should be sure to seek feedback from their mentors as early as possible, to ensure that their application is in top shape for the grading period. Good luck to all students!

opensourcereleasefeed has a interview with Fred Trotter on CCHIT certification/HIMSS and the new Health IT landscape with respect to Free/Open Source: "If you care about FOSS generally, I need you to show up at the HIMSS meeting. If you care about FOSS in Health IT, it is especially important that you be there. I believe that FOSS is the only real hope for untangling the mess that is Health IT. If you find any of these arguments compelling, show up. If you cannot show up, call in. If you cannot call in, then comment on the openhealth mailing list. HIMSS has consistently refused to consider FOSS players as real constituents. They are essentially a proprietary vendor lobby on par with the Business Software Alliance. My blog post points to some very specific examples of this....I can tell you that in Health IT, FOSS is the future."

This week, I present two Studio Dave mainstays, the 64 Studio media-optimized Linux distribution and the Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW), both of which are in the late stages of development toward milestone releases. I invite my readers to take a look at what's coming our way in 64 Studio 3.0 and Ardour3. The obligatory warnings: please note that this software is in a pre-release state. Testers are welcome, but don't expect the stability or finished feature set of a final release. You will be using the software at your own risk.

The Eclipse Foundation will soon be unwrapping the first release of Swordfish, an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) run-time framework that's taking aim at the market's many proprietary approaches to SOA. Swordfish enterprise service bus (ESB) is built on existing standards like OSGi, JBI, and SOAP with the goal of creating a open, industrial-strength platform for SOA projects.

Back in February we talked about the work that David Airlie is doing to rewrite the ATI Radeon driver for Mesa. Soon it now looks like this rewritten code may land in the mainline Mesa code-base once a few more items are addressed...

It’s time for another distro review and I’m a bit overdue with this one but I’m a big fan of Debian and the dedicated community who develop it, I make no secret of that. When I reviewed Etch (4.0) last year I declared that if I were to finally grow up and settle down with just one distro this would be the one. I like the fact that it’s not backed by any commercial entity and sticks closely to it’s Free Software principals. After some delay version 5.0 Lenny was finally released this Valentine’s Day, how appropriate but would it still be true love? There was only one way to find out…

A new survey out from the Internet Society (ISOC) and reported by Network World would have you believe there is no business case for the move to IPv6. And, despite the flaws in the survey (as clearly pointed out by a number of readers in a variety of places, both on Network World’s site and Slashdot), I would argue that they are right.

When it comes to cheap and secure off-site backup and storage, few services can beat Amazon S3. And if you want to easily back up your OpenOffice.org documents on Amazon S3, you can do so using a simple OpenOffice.org Basic macro and the aws Perl scripts.

Apache, among many other httpds, can be configured to log to an executable's STDIN instead of a file. But older Apaches, again like other httpds, won't let you pipe that programme's output to another's input, so you're limited to whatever the one was made to do.* httpd error logs often contain error conditions one wants to be alerted about, but for most people that means either monitoring it with some variant of tailf running on the host, or sshing to the host to run tail (or tail -f) on the log, piped to egrep, etcetera. This kind of set-up can work fine for one or two web servers, but gets cumbersome when you have more than just a few, and can become impracticable when dealing with many or when the error logs are being written to frequently.

At the CanSecWest Vancouver 2009 conference's PWN2OWN hacker's competition the Safari, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox browsers were successfully hacked to run code on their systems. The Chrome browser was recognized as being the least impacted by the hackers.

Many websites offer feeds as a way to promote most recently added articles, stories or updates. Most of these are accessible through links titled “XML” “RSS” or “ATOM”. These different types of feeds all use the same fundamentals to bring you the latest from a specific website. By using feeds you can collect and read information on topics without ever visiting the website which the text belongs to.

Sometimes you might run into an internet radio station or stream that you like, but which keeps dropping out because of too many people listening. So what can you do about it? This tutorial shows you how to use Icecast2 to set up a simple stream mirror on Linux.