Showing all newswire headlines

The results of the election for Debian Project Leader have been announced and Steve McIntyre has retained his leadership of the free software GNU/Linux distribution.

Let's imagine that you would like to have your dilapidated, wood-sided house painted. What would you do? If you're like most people, you'd get some recommendations, and then get some quotes from painters. You'd accept one, and then have your house painted for a fixed price you would have agreed on in advance. What a nice, logical system, especially for the buyer You'd be crazy to take on such a large financial commitment any other way, wouldn't you?

We have invested a lot of resources into enriching the Linux hardware experience particularly by improving Linux performance benchmarks and taking the necessary steps to make Linux-based benchmarking an attractive offer for hardware and software vendors. We have also strived to ensure that open-source developers understand the importance of automated testing and that they have the proper tools to fully automate tests relevant to them when looking for performance regressions and other conditions that otherwise would not easily be caught in an efficient and effective manner. At the same time, we have sought to standardize the benchmarking process of Linux desktops to make it easier for end-users and companies when looking to gauge how well something works on Linux. The Phoronix Test Suite has made immense progress over the past year, but today it is now time to expose our latest endeavor, Sandtorg.

This article by Julian Tancredi, promotes the transition into CSS-based web design for new EE users and demonstrates how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to improve the layout of the default EE website/blog template. This article will demonstrate how to use CSS to effectively take control of the appearance of any EE template keeping the structure and the presentation entirely separate.

FreeNX is a system that allows you to access your desktop from another machine over the Internet. You can use this to login graphically to your desktop from a remote location. One example of its use would be to have a FreeNX server set up on your home computer, and graphically logging in to the home computer from your work computer, using a FreeNX client. This article explains how to setup FreeNX server and Client in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

We have a few distros that are new to our list and quite a few familiar faces this week. Read on for the full list.

Marc Ewing is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in the mid-90s. Ewing graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. While at CMU, he was known to wear a red hat as he walked between classes. Ewing and co-founder Bob Young named their initial software after the hat, and the name Redhat stuck.

In my previous HowTO, I created the get_port.py script. Now this script did the job, but had a few faults in it. This script has been heavily tested on Cisco Core Switches and on Cisco Catalyst Switches. So far no issues like in the previous one. This script has fixed all the issues in the prior script as well as added functionality. See some below.. Major fault was the fact that the script could not match multiple MAC Addresses per port Also if the port had multiple MAC Addresses it usually would fail while doing the search Better error checking. For example if you searched by IP Address before, the error was ambiguous. Now the error will say the IP Address you are looking for is not in the ARP Table

Steve McIntire has been elected as the new Debian Project Leader. His new term will start on April 17th, 2009. Steve narrowly beat Stefano Zacchiroli who was also a candidate for the position of DPL.

As long as you do this for your own enjoyment, I'm pretty sure it's ethical. Today's post is borne of the fruits of my spare-time labour ;) I've spent most of my life in the Chicagoland area (after doing a whirlwind tour of of the world as an Army brat) and have been into rock and roll since about the time I grew my fetal ears :) As everyone who lives anywhere near Chicago knows, it's got a great variety of free radio on both the AM and FM dials. Formats change, call numbers change, signal frequencies fluctuate, etc, but there's almost always something to love on at any given moment.

The Open Source Business Conference, held at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, draws a lot of lawyers, from both corporate legal departments and law firms. Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit is available. Jeff Norman, a partner at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, delivered a talk on "Shims and Shams: Firewalling Proprietary Code in a Copyleft Context." This talk gives some insights into the current thinking on how difficult it can be to create a combined software product using both copyleft and proprietary code.

Why restrict yourself to merely carrying around your data on a thumb drive? Take your entire operating system on your flash drive with the excellent portable operating systems you'll find inside this week's Hive Five.

This is a list, fairly recent, in fact, of default passwords and user IDs for various makes and models of router devices. I thought it might be useful for bookmarking. The rest of the site is interesting as well.

At the Linux Collaboration Summit, the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center talked about the upcoming Moblin Linux OS.

Like anyone else who writes about software I subscribe to the maxim that a picture paints a thousand words. In short, I like to illustrate my text with timely and relevant screenshots; so I’m always on the lookout for good, free software to get the job done. Back in the mists of time I looked at a command-line utility called Scrot. It’s immensely powerful and configurable but it does take some setting up. Not really entirely convenient when you just want to concentrate on writing the definitive user guide for some piece of killer software. I think Shutter may well be the solution. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

On Thursday the New York Times reported that 100 IBM lawyers were holed up in a hotel in Silicon Valley poring over the Sun intellectual property portfolio. Four days later the proposed deal has collapsed, even though Big Blue's desire to get its hands on Sun's IP is said to be one of the primary factors behind its move for the company. So what is going on here? Have those lawyers found a big problem? Are the anti-trust issues too much of an obstacle. Or is this just a case of IBM playing hardball? Maybe it is the latter. I can't help thinking of an article that Andrew Watson wrote for IAM a while back. One which I have quoted before.

Scientific Learning Corp. announced its plans to contribute free neuroscience- and technology-based activities from the Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant family of products, as well as newly created lessons, to FreeReading.net. FreeReading.net is a free, research-based open source reading program for the elementary grades. "We're excited to partner with an open source instructional program developed by leading researchers and curriculum experts to help educators around the world teach kids to read," said Andy Myers, CEO of Scientific Learning. "At Scientific Learning, we believe there are two sides to effective learning -- a research-based curriculum and a well-prepared brain that is able to capture, process and retain information. Through this partnership, we can provide teachers with easy access to free curriculum that helps students improve the underlying cognitive skills that build brain capacity and accelerate learning."

Almost one year later the first release of "a program kinda like portsentry" is here. It would have been sooner if I had not made the mistake of trying to adopt someone else's program wholesale. Writing from the ground up proved to be the right thing to do for a change. Anyhow here it is netward-1.0; a small bit of software that one can apply pcap filters to for monitoring and logging. I plan on adding a few alerting and similar capabilities later but netward is a good first line of defence

Most vendors are already preparing for a tough Christmas. Those selling Linux-based solutions, however, can expect to spread plenty of holiday cheer, according to a new report from IDC, "The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy." (PDF) Even as Red Hat recently talked up its impressive quarterly results, it's important to recognize that not all of Linux's success can be seen in corporate financial results.

One of the things about getting older is that you learn to ignore things until you have to do something about them. It’s a learned efficiency, I suppose, rationing your increasingly precious time out to the unceasing demands upon it. I finally realized I have to do some serious thinking about cloud computing. “Hang on a minute, don’t you work at Google ?” I hear you say. Well, yes, but in my defense many of the people who work at Google don’t have anything to do with cloud computing. Some of us have to keep the conference rooms clean, write Open Source/Free Software, things of that nature.