Showing all newswire headlines

One thing common among all these modems is that they do not provide secure access like Secure Shell (ssh) as all they provide is ftp/telnet/http etc which are all clear text protocols. Hence, it is a huge security risk to expose these interfaces to the internet and then access them from outside.

This article describes Puppy Linux, a flexible, fast distribution that's always a favorite among DesktopLinux readers. Author Dave Dibble briefly reviews MiPup2, one of many ready-made Puppy "puplets," and updates us on Puppy's current state and planned new features. As background, "puplets" are custom builds of Puppy that are shared with the Puppy community. Some, like "TeenPup," apparently take hundreds of hours to create. Others, like Muppy, have been years in the making!

Benjamin Franklin: scientist, scholar, statesman, and . . . systems administrator? Yes, 200 years or so before the birth of UNIX®, Franklin scribed sage advice to keep systems humming. Here are 10 of Franklin's more notable tips.

The vast majority of Linux users would never be satisfied without access to a graphical user interface. However, even in 2009 there remain many reasons why console based applications can be extremely desirable. Although console applications are very useful for updating, configuring, and repairing a system, their benefits are not only confined to system administration. Console based applications are light on system resources (very useful on low spec machines), can be faster and more efficient than their graphical counterparts, they do not stop working when X needs to be restarted, and are great for scripting purposes. So what can users do with the command-line? There is a wide range of console based software which performs the same or similar functions to their graphical equivalents, even in the field of multimedia.

One of the intriguing battles I have been watching over the past couple of months is a silent battle between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat. I say silent because it is being played out deep inside the New York Stock Exchange and, unless you're actively watching, you'll have missed the tussle. At the same time it is an fascinating battle that represents many things: the old versus the new, Linux versus Unix and investor sentiment.

Have you seen the Debian XFCE-LXDE distribution? Well, you should, it's awesome!

And then, sometimes, it rains... I think today's post's title represents the first time I've ever so blatantly hyphenated part of an awkward sentence in order to make it seem intelligible (and not so incredibly long). As I read it now, I wonder what I was thinking.

The first Nigerian conference on Free and Open Source Software was held this week in Kano, Nigeria. The conference featured local speakers, consultants, network engineers, system administrators and academics, and international guests from KDE for three days at Bayero University of Kano. Over 500 students and professionals attended, filling the hall to capacity.

There are a variety of package managers available for different Linux distributions. Mandriva uses urpmi; Debian and Ubuntu use apt. Fedora and Red Hat use yum, while Gentoo uses portage. Some distributions provide support for more than one package manager as well. This week, we take a look at yum, or Yellowdog Updater Modified. Yum is written in python and has been in use with Fedora and Red Hat for many years. Yum has been proven to work, and despite some criticism as to its speed in comparison to other package mangers, it does the job, even if it is a little bit slower.

Yes, it's apparently another netbook today on OSNews. Netbooks were supposed to become the major foot in the door, but as soon as Microsoft got off its fat bum and started offering Windows XP to netbook OEMs, the popularity among OEMs of Linux has dwindled; when the netbook surge started, Linux was the operating system of choice among OEMs, but now, the Windows version comes first, and the Linux version later - if at all. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin basically tells OEMs: "Yer doing it wrong".

Where Fedora is, so do they stand: shortly after openSUSE announced its own trademark guidelines, Fedora is coming up with its own variation.

This year NVIDIA has been following the "release early, release often" mantra with it seeming like two weeks can't even go by without seeing a new Linux driver -- whether it's a beta driver, an official driver update, or one of their legacy drivers picking up a few fixes (at times they have even released four drivers at once). On the opposite spectrum, AMD continues with monthly Catalyst driver updates on both Linux and windows. Rather than a continual stream of new public driver releases, AMD maintains a private beta program for their Catalyst Linux driver. This private program is made up of AMD developers, hardware vendors, users of different Linux distributions, other Linux vendors, and end-users. Phoronix has been apart of this program for years, but those testing this driver are under a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement with AMD regarding pre-releases of their Linux software. Today, however, AMD has decided to declassify some information pertaining to its Linux Graphics Driver Beta Program.

The SoC is an effort that first started in 2005 as an effort to get student involved in open source code development. Google provides a stipend to the student and to the mentoring organization that helps the student. The SoC started off in 2005 with an allocation for 200 students and a budget of $1 million, which ultimately grew to 410 students that same year. In 2008 it grew to a staggering 1,125 students which totaled an open source cash infusion of at least $5.6 million dollars. 2009 is a recession year -- even for Google, so initially (at least), Google is capping the number of students for the SoC at 1,000.

Linux sound software has been the foundation of my music studio since the late 1990s, but as we all know, that software won't produce so much as a peep without the right hardware. Setting up a stable Linux system for audio production can be problematic enough, and the wrong decision about your hardware can render your otherwise powerful system mute and tuneless. This article briefly describes some of the audio production hardware I've acquired and employed here at Studio Dave during the last ten years. I hope that my readers find this information helpful when making their own decisions about their audio hardware purchases.

The French Gendarmerie's gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. "This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems." Guimard this Thursday in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands gave a presentation on the move from a Microsoft-based to an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based desktop. The Lieutenant-Colonel was one of the keynote speakers at an annual conference organised by NOiV, the Dutch national resource centre on open source and open standards. Most of these savings are on proprietary software licences. Up until 2004 the Gendarmerie acquired 12.000 to 15.000 licences annually. In 2005 it bought just 27. "Since July 2007 we have bought two hundred Microsoft licences. If one of us wants a new PC, it comes with Ubuntu. This encourages our users to migrate." Guimard estimates Gendarmerie since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.

Wolfram Alpha can promise all it likes, but ultimately it has to deliver. Which is where things get a little sticky, because at the moment Wolfram Alpha remains firmly behind closed doors and not open to public scrutiny. There is no demo, there is no public beta of the alpha.

I'm a Thinkpad fan from way back, though anymore I think it's a misplaced loyalty because Lenovo treats Linux like the perv uncle and keeps it hidden away, and plasters "We recommend Windows!" all over the place. It took some detective work to find the S-series IdeaPad netbooks on Lenovo.com, and forget finding one with Linux. I about Googled my fingers off and found a number of reviews and announcements that claimed it had either SUSE Linux or Linpus Linux options, but I never found them. In fact I am getting very tired of vendors who claim to love the penguin and Free/Open Source software, and then make it impossible to actually purchase any OEM Linux computers. That is why I stick with independent vendors like ZaReason. They tell the truth.

Vyatta has been offering an open source alternative to proprietary networking gear since 2006, and with the new release is aiming to expand its share. The new Vyatta release comes as the big networking vendors Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Juniper roll out new silicon to provide greater high-end capacity and network performance. Vyatta, however, isn't necessarily after the high-end of the market. "The ultra high end of the market will always be silicon switching," Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy and marketing at Vyatta told InternetNews.com. "The question is how far can go with software."

More than 100 people showed up for Saturday's Rewired State, held at the Guardian's Kings Cross offices (and to meetings in Brighton and Manchester), to prove that they could do a better job than the government of making government information usable by the public.

It appears that the Android OS has two distinct purposes, one for the mobile phone and one for the netbook. If Google moves Android to a netbook, it begins the move from being a pure cloud vendor to the desktop. And Microsoft and Apple should be worried.