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Italy-based KDev has found another use for its tiny, cellular radio-equipped Linux box. In its newest "Easy Guardian" iteration, the Acme FoxBox works as a network monitor that uses ICMP pings, SNMP scans, and text messaging to alert users to network events.

On the surface, a little choice isn’t going to kill anybody. In fact, choice is good. And if some poor kids can get a laptop, learn a bit and be exposed to the world I don’t care about the operating system. But here’s what gives me pause about XP coming to the XO (statement, Techmeme): There’s no way Linux will get an equal shake on OLPC’s XO. In fact, I reckon that more XO units will ship with XP than Linux in the not too distant future. Why? Governments are making the buying decisions. Not kids.

Open source icon Stormy Peters recently joined us for a live Network World chat. Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open soruce software is more secure than proprietary code.

I chose to only review the GUI web browsers, since it's not exactly appropiate to compare a text-based browser like Lynx with Opera, for example. The browsers reviewed are the latest ones included in Debian Lenny, current date (May 17, 2008). The system used to review them is a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz with 1 GB DDRAM2. The comparison includes the major five Linux browsers: Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, Epiphany and Galeon. I'm aware of others like Dillo or the older Mozilla, but decided to include only the big players at the moment.

Ever wonder what makes a computer tick or how a UNIX server does what it does? Discover what happens when you push the power button on your computer. This article discusses the different boot types, managing the AIX bootlist and the AIX boot sequence. After reading this article, you will better understand what exactly happens when your server starts.

Pawel Dawidek first ported ZFS to FreeBSD from OpenSolaris in April of 2007. He continues to actively port new ZFS features from OpenSolaris, and focuses on improving overall ZFS stability. During the introduction to his talk at BSDCan, he explained that his goal was to offer an accessible view of ZFS internals. His discussion was broken into three sections, a review of the layers ZFS is built from and how they work together, a look at unique features found in ZFS and how they work internally, and a report on the current status of ZFS in FreeBSD.

At the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun announced plans to open source Java. This wasn’t exactly a surprise to those of us working on Java at Red Hat, given that there had been rumblings before. But this was a real announcement. We were immediately interested in learning exactly which license Sun would choose. Even if it was a legitimate open source license, it still might not allow us to combine our code with Sun’s.

On Wednesday, DeviceVM, the company behind the distribution, said the hardware manufacturer would be putting Splashtop — which Asus calls "Express Gate" — into a million motherboards a month. Splashtop includes a Firefox-derived browser and the Skype internet-telephony application.

Cleaning up the mess left by the OpenSSH vulnerability in Debian and Debian-based distros (including Ubuntu) is easier than I thought. For those who haven't heard about the problem, I refer you to my recent entry, or invite you to Google it. I've had my Etch box -- which has both OpenSSH-client and OpenSSH-server installed -- turned off for the past few days. I'm using it as a Web server on the local network, and yes, I've been SSHing into the box for weeks now. Here's what I did ...

Peter Hintgens, writing at Freesoftware Magazine, explains why the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard is a dreadful development. More importantly, he tells us what can be done to combat such things. You can read more about it here

Everyone who surfs the Net is eminently trackable. Internet data packets include not only the actual data being sent, but also headers with routing information that is used to guide the packages to their destinations. Even if you use encryption for extra safety, the routing information -- which cannot be encrypted -- can reveal details about what you're doing, who you're talking to, what services you're connecting to, and what data you're accessing. Intermediaries (authorized or not) can also see that data and learn about you. If you want a higher level of anonymity, TorK can do the job. It uses The Onion Router (Tor) network to provide you with a safer way of browsing.

John Calcote has written a very detailed article on the GNU Autotools and you can read it all at the Freesoftware Magazine website.

Discover Broadband Transmission-line Characterization Using Short-Pulse Propagation, a software toolkit that contains an advanced 2D field solver and signal-processing facility for extracting broadband transmission line properties. Furthermore, become familiar with its two key components, CZ2D and Gamma-Z.

Andrew Min gives you a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google's Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. You can read (and/or listen) to the full article at

The recent advent of Mac OS X systems for Intel has been a welcome reward for those of us that need Windows compatibly.

BSDCan 2008 officially started this morning at 9AM with an opening talk by the event's organizer, Dan Langille. However, in reality the event has already been running for two days, with the FreeBSD tutorials having started on the 14'th. After arriving in Ottawa yesterday afternoon and finding my room in a 20 story University of Ottawa residence, I wandered down to the Royal Oak Pub for early registration, meeting several dozen BSD hackers from all over the world.

Linux on the desktop has yet to gain any real market presence. Despite the unrest over Microsoft Windows Vista, the companies that focus on Linux as a business have yet to deliver a go-to-market proposition that is compelling for the consumer, for the retailer, distributors, and original equipment manufacturers. Author John Terpstra continues his look at the challenges facing the desktop and server markets, with a close examination of current market dynamics.

The FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization. The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

Potential conflicts and overlap between the first update to HTML in a decade by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XHTML has been addressed by the standards body. The group, meanwhile, has also acknowledged vendors are - once again - pushing their own platform-specific technologies, this time on RIA, with the standards process unable to keep up. This poses a problem on interoperability.

As has been widely reported, the maintainers of Debian's OpenSSL packages made some errors recently that have potentially compromised the security of any sshd-equipped system used remotely by Debian users. System administrators may wish to purge authorized_key files of public keys generated since 2006 by affected client machines. Simply using a Debian-based machine to access a remote server via SSH would not be enough to put the machine at risk. However, if the user copied a public key generated on a Debian-based system to the remote server, for example to take advantage of the higher security offered by password-free logins, then the weak key could make the server susceptible to brute-force attacks, especially if the user's name is easily guessable.