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Red Hat's open source Network application project evolves with a plan to get rid of Oracle on the back end. "The application code for Spacewalk is open source, but we are using a proprietary back end for the database," Todd Warner Product Manager, RHN Satellite and Project Spacewalk told InternetNews.com. "For an open source project that's a problem since we have all these open source bits and it requires a proprietary database. It's a big Achilles heal that we'll be focusing a tremendous amount of effort to rectify."

Hi All, Here's the 15th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to change your OpenLDAP loglevel to get more information, but can't take your directory server offline":..

You don't need to fork over big bucks – or even any bucks – to keep your online activities and identity secret. The open source community has dozens of privacy-related projects in development, and some of them have already proven themselves to be among the best privacy protection tools available. These tools are targeted at three broad groups of people. First are products aimed at the general public. Everyone with a computer needs applications like firewalls, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention, and password management. But there are also email encryption, anonymous file sharing, anonymous surfing, and other apps for those with more pressing privacy needs.

The PasTmon passive traffic monitor keeps an eye on your network, recording which clients are interacting with which services, when and how long things took. You can then use the application's PHP Web interface to investigate these figures to see if any host is connecting to Web services that it shouldn't, or is contacting services suspiciously more frequently than you would expect for normal operation, or when response times become excessively long. The Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora repositories do not include packages for PasTmon. Although the version number is still low, the project has had releases available for three years.

Ease of use is one of the main interests in the Ubuntu 8.10 server so administrators tend to look at Ubuntu not only because it's a staple of the Ubuntu Desktop but the server version has been known...

The economy may be a shambles, but Brian Gentile's software company, JasperSoft, is doing better than ever. JasperSoft posted record revenue for the quarter that ended in October, and its customer tally rose 63 percent over the previous period. The gain is all the more notable considering the record cutbacks in corporate software spending.

Below Mac user numbers, we're talking much smaller shares of internet traffic. Linux had a bump to 0.82 per cent from 0.71 per cent of web browsers. The iPhone grabbed 0.37 per cent of traffic, which also was a small increase. Obviously, Microsoft's 89.69 per cent isn't something to sneeze at (as made clear by El Reg's super scientific graph below) — but hey, it's a big symbolic loss in our deca-based number system.

[They better lookout, we're almost to 1% lol!- Scott]

Solaris 10 packet sequence numbers. Are they still bullet-proof? Were they ever? Does It Matter Anymore? A study in gross oversimplification. Today, we're going to look at a subject that gets plenty of attention (but, maybe not as much publicity) in the world of Unix and Linux network computing: TCP packet sequence number prediction, how it's used to protect network transmissions and whether or not, with the advent of packet checksumming, etc, it's even a factor in basic network security anymore.

The global economic crisis is taking its toll on many technology companies and Mandriva, the Linux company based in France, has now taken a hit. Last week, the company announced that it would be terminating the services of all its external contractors, that is those who work from remote locations.

For the first time, Apple is recommending the use of anti-virus tools to protect Mac systems. Long something of a phantom menace, strains of malware capable of infecting Mac machines have gradually been increasing in prevalence over recent months. In addition, VXers are making more use of web-based attack and applications specific vulnerabilities to infect PCs whatever their underlying operating system might be. Windows-specific malware attacks are still orders of magnitude greater than assaults on Mac machines, but the risk to Apple fans is now enough for the Church of Jobs to admit a risk exists.

[Steve says the vaunted Apple OS needs an anti-virus, but I thought it was secure? Sorry, couldn't stop myself..;-)- Scott]

Earlier this month we saw the military ban the use of USB drives and other removable media. Apparently the virus outbreak that lead to this measure affected 75% of all systems at the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan....... This is really quite frightening.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, December 1, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a list of what's wrong with Linux (and how to fix it), a kinder, gentler, more open, Microsoft, a kinder, more open, Atheros, Linux on the iPhone, Intel didn't know netbooks would go like this, and more.

Valve Software was in the market a little over a year ago for a software engineer who would, among other duties, work with porting Windows-based games to Linux. No word on who got the job, or how that engineer's first anniversary review went, but evidently, this year was productive. It seems, according to Phoronix, the "Left 4 Dead" demo (Windows client version) shipped with some very suspicious sounding Linux libraries. The file names (such as steamclient_linux.so) lend some weight to the theory that these files have little to do with the Linux server build.

Last year a new Linux distribution came about and immediately began appearing on some budget PCs within retail establishments. Good OS, the company behind the gOS Linux distribution, that launched the conceptual Google OS last year has had a quite successful 2008.

A few months ago I started sensing the need for a replacement for my aging and ailing HP Omnibook 4150. That machine's audio capabilities were negligible even with external hardware, but it had been serviceable for writing articles and as a portable MIDI composition environment. Alas, after years of travel and abuse the Omnibook's hard drive gasped its last breath of life. I had no fear for my data, the drive had been backed up, but clearly the time had come to buy a new portable computer.

Google has published its plan to build into Chrome what is arguably its most requested feature: the ability to accept extensions that can customize how the open-source Web browser operates. And guess what? Google's dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

What is the D-Bus? From the D-Bus documentation: "D-Bus is an inter-process communication mechanism—a medium for local communication between processes running on the same host. (Inter-host connects may be added in the future, but that is not what D-Bus is meant for). D-Bus is meant to be fast and lightweight, and is designed for use as a unified middleware layer underneath the main free desktop environments" So for the non technically inclined (why are you reading this anyway) ;) basically a simple way to think of D-Bus, is that it's a way for processes on an operating system to communicate with each other. That's probably a simple and non accurate enough wording, but it should help grasp the concept. Many utilities nowadays are implementing D-Bus connectivity. It is especially interesting (well for me anyway) to script some GUI elements like for example my KDE-4 desktop from the command line. This would help automate some tasks and is cool anyways. Let's see how to begin talking on the D-Bus

Microsoft informs computer shops that if they put some Vista advertising in their newspaper advertisements (or other forms of ads), there will be money in the bank for them, paid in the form of marketing money from Microsoft.

My experience with Fedora has not been bad at all. I think a big reason for that is that my laptop has practically no need for proprietary drivers. The intel graphics card open source driver has gotten quite good and provides painless and efficient compositing out of the box. In fact, every piece of hardware, including sound, works out of the box. So, that leaves me free to compare distros by their features and ease of use. So what have I found in using Fedora 10 KDE version?

One of the first things I do upon installing a Linux distribution is put the Network Monitor applet on my GNOME panel. Watching the blue lights twinkle on and off makes me aware of network traffic. But if you want more details about what's happening on your network, such as which application is hogging bandwidth or what each network interface is up to, you can turn to specialty tools like NetHogs and IPTraf. While NetHogs is a unique tool altogether, IPTraf can be used on a server as well as by a home user.