Showing all newswire headlines

There I was standing around the LUG booth at the annual Linux expo when I realized that unlike years past, there were considerable numbers of female attendants. No, I am not referring exclusively to those female models hired to promote an OS (I won't mention which one) wearing skimpy demon costumes.

Irony at its best. It appears that Redmond - The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community, formerly known as Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine is currently flagged as a badware site, and third-party exploit detection tools are also detecting internal pages as exploit hosting ones, in this particular case Mal/Badsrc-A. What is Mal/Badsrc-A? Mal/Badsrc-A is a malicious web page also known as HTML.XORER, that has been compromised to load a script from a malicious website.

In When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?, I mentioned that I'm considering upgrading my System76 laptop from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. A commenter named Scummy suggested that a similarly configured Dell system is cheaper: Dude - you just paid a $350 ‘Linux Tax’ by NOT going mainstream in your hardware…

Linux e-mail vendor @Mail Monday released an open source version of its Webmail client and is making it available for free. The client, @Mail Open, is AJAX-based and works against any e-mail server that supports the IMAP and POP3 e-mail protocols, including those from Microsoft and IBM/Lotus.

This document describes how to upgrade your desktop from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 via PreUpgrade. PreUpgrade provides a frontend that allows the user to easily download all packages that are needed for the distribution upgrade, and then perform the distribution upgrade.

Microsoft has claimed user "complacency" is to blame for malware infections, and denied that its Vista operating system is less secure than Windows 2000.

Asus sent BIOSLEVEL.com their latest AMD-based barebone. BIOSLEVEL.com puts it through several benchmarks and the outlook looks good for Linux support.

I have one swappable drive for my test box that has Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 triple-booting. I hadn't connected the drive in 25 days, and I booted into both Ubuntus to do updates. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS had 26 updates. None of them were for the OpenSSH problems that have plagued Debian-derived Linux distributions in the past week (and, more troubling, over the past two years).

Now get a load of this. The only sponsor of SourceForge.net2008 Community Choice Awards is Microsoft. Yes, you heard that right.

Steve Ballmer finally gets to join his buddy Bill Gates in the "food target club" after a visit to the Hungarian University of Economy. A guy (grad student? just some dude?) stood up, yelled "Give back the money of the taxpayers" in an accent Ballmer probably couldn't understand, and started throwing eggs at him.

This story is about an young female hacker who becomes the student of an even more unlikely female computer hacker and their journey to become "Open Source Hackers".

In an age when paper qualifications and certificates of one description or another are touted as evidence of competence, it's refreshing to know that the top MySQL expert in Australia has only been officially certified on a version of the program which came out years ago.

Learning good habits in XML can make all the difference between taking advantage of the functionality offered by XML and struggling against the XML standard to get the basics of validation and parsing right. Discover 10 good habits that improve your effectiveness and efficiency as you work with XML documents and data.

Ok, you have to give some kudos to Windows: everyone knows what a window is. In the Linux world, KDE and GNOME aren’t quite as obvious. A gnome stands in your garden or inhabits the World of Warcraft, and KDE doesn’t even spell a word. The truth is they’re the two major window environments for Linux today; if you don’t like one type of UI you have another. Here’s what they do, how they differ and how you can bend them to your will.

Open source is said to be about scratching your particular itches - and I've been working my butt off for the last several months along with a small, select team of developers doing just that. All our hard work have so far resulted in a very experimental linux distribution that's definitely not ready for users yet (or even developers) but does have quite a few interesting ideas and features.

Since the introduction of AMD's new Linux OpenGL driver and their open-source strategy running in parallel, the past few months have been especially exciting for ATI Linux users and the Linux graphics scene in general. To many Linux users, ATI graphics have went from being a name synonymous with problems and poor 3D performance to being an open-source crown jewel that has set a precedence in the industry by releasing their GPU register documentation, but at the same time continuing to develop their high-performance proprietary driver for users interested in the best performance and enabling all of the bells and whistles on their graphics card.

I've been using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July, 2006. After happily using SimplyMepis Linux for 15 months, I switched to using Debian Linux full-time in December, 2007, after I installed Debian Etch (KDE) for the very first time. I carefully documented that entire installation and its subsequent configuration in My Debian Adventure. Since then, I've been very happily using Debian Etch, the "Stable" branch of the Debian family of distros. Once I experienced Etch's rock-solid performance, I was never even tempted to delve into the newer Debian Lenny (Testing branch) or Debian Sid (Unstable branch), even though those other branches had newer Linux kernels and software versions. All of that changed yesterday. Now I'm using Debian Lenny and I probably won't go back to using Etch. This article explains why, and describes my Debian Adventure with Lenny.

First through the Eee PC and now through its PC motherboards, Asus is rapidly carving a global reputation for itself as the company which knows how to take Linux mainstream. The question is will including the minimalist cut-down version of Linux called Splashtop on a million motherboards a month finally bring on the Linux desktop age or has it made the desktop redundant?

In this corner, the challenger, the former executive director of MIT’s Media Lab, software guru, now with Sugar Labs, the champion of Linux, Walter Benderrrrr! And in this corner, the champion, the co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab, best-selling author, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the hardware champion, Nickolas Negropont-eeee! All right, let’s get ready to stumbleeeeee!

A new advocacy group, the Public Software Foundation (PSF), is working to make free and open source software available to local libraries so it can be checked out and used just like a book or video. The premise is simple: hand out one CD and maybe you've taught one person; make it available in a library and perhaps you'll reach hundreds or thousands.